University of Pittsburgh Press

The University of Pittsburgh Press is a publisher with distinguished lists in a wide range of scholarly and cultural fields. They publish books for general readers, scholars, and students. The Press focuses on selected academic areas: Latin American studies, Russian and East European studies, Central Asian studies, composition and literacy studies, environmental studies, urban studies, the history of architecture and the built environment, and the history and philosophy of science, technology, and medicine. Their books about Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania include history, art, architecture, photography, biography, fiction, and guidebooks.

Their renowned Pitt Poetry Series represents many of the finest poets active today, as reflected in the many prestigious awards their work has garnered over the past four decades. In addition, the Press is home to the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and, in rotation with other university presses, the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. They sponsor the prestigious Drue Heinz Literature Prize, which recognises the finest collective works of short fiction available in an international competition.

Shared Truth, A Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 176
ISBN: 9780822965886
Pub Date: 16 Apr 2019
Series: Latinx and Latin American Profiles
Illustrations: 7 b/w photos
Description:
Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol (Lizards Lounging in the Sun) is a Mexican theater company that performs what is known as theater of the real.By taking reality as its subject, this genre claims a special relationship to reality, truth, and authenticity. In A Shared Truth, Julie Ann Ward traces the development of this contemporary and cutting-edge collective’s unique aesthetic.
Crisis Cultures Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 232
ISBN: 9780822965862
Pub Date: 09 Apr 2019
Series: Illuminations
Description:
Drawing on a mix of political, economic, literary, and filmic texts, Crisis Cultures challenges current cultural histories of the neoliberal period by arguing that financialization, and not just neoliberalism, has been at the center of the dramatic transformations in Latin American societies in the last thirty years. Starting from political economic figures such as crisis, hyperinflation, credit, and circulation and exemplary cultural texts, Whitener traces the interactions between culture, finance, surplus populations, and racialized state violence after 1982 in Mexico and Brazil. Crisis Cultures makes sense of the emergence of new forms of exploitation and terrifying police and militarized violence by tracking the cultural and discursive forms, including real abstraction and the favela and immaterial cadavers and voided collectivities, that have emerged in the complicated aftermath of the long downturn and global turn to finance.
Even Then Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 72
ISBN: 9780822965817
Pub Date: 09 Apr 2019
Description:
A new collection of poetry from a founding member of the Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange.
Of Greater Dignity than Riches Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 336
ISBN: 9780822965695
Pub Date: 09 Apr 2019
Illustrations: 85
Description:
Extreme poverty, which intensified in India during colonial rule, peaked in the 1920s—after decades of imperialist exploitation, famine, and disease—a time when architects, engineers, and city authorities proposed a new type of housing for India’s urban poor and industrial workers. As Farhan Karim argues, economic scarcity became a central inspiration for architectural modernism in the subcontinent. As India moved from colonial rule to independence, the Indian government, business entities, international NGOs, and intergovernmental agencies took major initiatives to modernize housing conditions and the domestic environment of the state’s low-income population.
Every Ravening Thing Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 88
ISBN: 9780822965756
Pub Date: 02 Apr 2019
Description:
Author of two previous collections of poetry: BLACK HOPE (1997) and ANTIDOTE FOR NIGHT (2015). de la O is also the publisher of the journal ASKEW.Keats at Fourteen She dozes, her nails fretted against the linen’s border,a hectic rose flaming each cheek.
Improvised Cities Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 456
ISBN: 9780822945369
Pub Date: 02 Apr 2019
Description:
Beginning in the 1950s, an explosion in rural-urban migration dramatically increased the population of cities throughout Peru, leading to an acute housing shortage and the proliferation of self-built shelters clustered in barriadas, or squatter settlements. Improvised Cities examines the history of aided self-help housing, or technical assistance to self-builders, which took on a variety of forms in Peru from 1954 to 1986. While the postwar period saw a number of trial projects in aided self-help housing throughout the developing world, Peru was the site of significant experiments in this field and pioneering in its efforts to enact a large-scale policy of land tenure regularization in improvised, unauthorized cities.
Mechanism Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 200
ISBN: 9780822945475
Pub Date: 02 Apr 2019
Illustrations: 58
Description:
The mechanical philosophy first emerged as a leading player on the intellectual scene in the early modern period—seeking to explain all natural phenomena through the physics of matter and motion—and the term mechanism was coined. Over time, natural phenomena came to be understood through machine analogies and explanations and the very word mechanism, a suggestive and ambiguous expression, took on a host of different meanings. Emphasizing the important role of key ancient and early modern protagonists, from Galen to Robert Boyle, this book offers a historical investigation of the term mechanism from the late Renaissance to the end of the seventeenth century, at a time when it was used rather frequently in complex debates about the nature of the notion of the soul.
Playlist Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 72
ISBN: 9780822965848
Pub Date: 02 Apr 2019
Description:
11 / 22 / 17A good day for a drive to the country underneath the apple tree with Carmen McRaeproving you can sing and talk at the same time“and hear the bluebirds sing” she sings as if there were a hyphen separating “blue” from “birds”and we “shoot up” with summertime
no time like now Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 88
ISBN: 9780822965824
Pub Date: 26 Mar 2019
Description:
In Codrescu’s own words: “I wrote my first book of poems, License to Carry a Gun (Big Table, 1970), when I first lived in New York City, 1967–1970. Those were troubled times and I was 21 years-old. Decades later the city has changed and the times are still troubled.
Foundations of a Free Society Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 472
ISBN: 9780822945482
Pub Date: 26 Mar 2019
Series: Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies
Description:
Foundations of a Free Society brings together some of the most knowledgeable Ayn Rand scholars and proponents of her philosophy, as well as notable critics, putting them in conversation with other intellectuals who also see themselves as defenders of capitalism and individual liberty. United by the view that there is something importantly right—though perhaps also much wrong—in Rand’s political philosophy, contributors reflect on her views with the hope of furthering our understandings of what sort of society is best and why. The volume provides a robust elaboration and defense of the foundation of Rand’s political philosophy in the principle that force paralyzes and negates the functioning of reason; it offers an in-depth scholarly discussion of Rand’s view on the nature of individual rights and the role of government in defending them; it deals extensively with the similarities and differences between Rand’s thought and the libertarian tradition (to which she is often assimilated) and objections to her positions arising from this tradition; it explores Rand’s relation to the classical liberal tradition, specifically with regard to her defense of freedom of the intellect; and it discusses her views on the free market, with special attention to the relation between these views and those of the Austrian school of economics.
Animal Who Writes, The Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 288
ISBN: 9780822965794
Pub Date: 19 Mar 2019
Description:
Writing begins with unconscious feelings of something that insistently demands to be responded to, acted upon, or elaborated into a new entity. Writers make things that matter—treaties, new species, software, and letters to the editor—as they interact with other humans of all kinds. As they write, they also continually remake themselves.
Cuban Studies 47 Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 384
ISBN: 9780822945406
Pub Date: 19 Mar 2019
Series: Cuban Studies
Description:
Cuban Studies is the preeminent journal for scholarly work on Cuba. Each volume includes articles in English and Spanish and a large book review section.Cuban Studies 47 includes a dossier on cultural politics and political cultures of the Cuban Revolution.
On the End of Privacy Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 304
ISBN: 9780822965688
Pub Date: 12 Mar 2019
Illustrations: 22 b&w illustrations
Description:
In preparation for this book, and to better understand our screen-based, digital world, Miller only accessed information online for seven years.On the End of Privacy explores how literacy is transformed by online technology that lets us instantly publish anything that we can see or hear. Miller examines the 2010 suicide of Tyler Clementi, a young college student who jumped off the George Washington Bridge after he discovered that his roommate spied on him via webcam.
Paths for Cuba Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 408
ISBN: 9780822965497
Pub Date: 29 Jan 2019
Description:
The Cuban model of communism has been an inspiration—from both a positive and negative perspective—for social movements, political leaders, and cultural expressionists around the world. With changes in leadership, the pace of change has accelerated following decades of economic struggles. The death of Fidel Castro and the reduced role of Raúl Castro seem likely to create further changes, though what these changes look like is still unknown.
Intermittences Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 272
ISBN: 9780822965664
Pub Date: 22 Jan 2019
Series: Illuminations
Description:
The construction of memory entails a battle not only between memory and forgetting but also between different memories. There are multiple constructions of memory, and in the dispute between them, some become hegemonic, while others remain in the margins. Ana Forcinito explores the intermittences of transitional justice and memory in post-dictatorship Uruguay.
Polyphonic Machine, The Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 296
ISBN: 9780822965534
Pub Date: 22 Jan 2019
Series: Illuminations
Description:
Focusing on the work of the Argentine authors César Aira, Marcelo Cohen, and Ricardo Piglia, The Polyphonic Machine conducts a close analysis of the interrelations between capitalism and political violence in late twentieth-century Argentina. Taking a long historical view, the book considers the most recent Argentine dictatorship of 1976–1983 together with its antecedents and its after-effects, exploring the transformations in power relations and conceptions of resistance which accompanied the political developments experienced throughout this period. By tracing allusive fragments of Argentine political history and drawing on a range of literary and theoretical sources Geraghty proposes that Aira, Cohen and Piglia propound a common analysis of Argentine politics during the twentieth century and construct a synergetic philosophical critique of capitalism and political violence.