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.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 88
ISBN: 9780822966869
Pub Date: 11 Oct 2022
Description:
Stylistically innovative, deeply moving, carefully researched, Martha Collins's eleventh volume of poetry combines her well-known attention to social issues with the elegiac mode of her previous book. She focuses here on race, gun violence, recent wars, and, in an extended sequence, the history of coal - first as her ancestors mined it, then from its geological origins to our ecologically threatened present. Casualty Reports is both indictment and lament, a work that speaks forcefully to our troubled history and our present times.
Pages: 168
ISBN: 9780822947493
Pub Date: 04 Oct 2022
Series: Pitt Drue Heinz Lit Prize
Pages: 221
ISBN: 9780822967101
Pub Date: 31 Jan 2024
Series: Pitt Drue Heinz Lit Prize
Description:
Happiness and connection prove fickle in this debut collection of eleven linked stories introducing Babbie and Donnie. She is a thrice-divorced former call girl, and he is a sobriety-challenged trucker turned yogi. Along with their community of exes, in-laws, and coworkers, Babbie and Donnie share a longing to re-forge their lives, a task easier said than done in Mobile, Alabama, which bears its own share of tainted history.
Despite overwhelming challenges and the ever-looming specters of status, race, and class, the characters in It Falls Gently All Around and Other Stories strive for versions of the American dream through modern and often unconventional means. Told with humor and honesty, these stories remind us not only about the fallibility of being human and the resistance of some to change but also about finding redemption in unlikely places.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 302
ISBN: 9780822947486
Pub Date: 04 Oct 2022
Description:
Technocratic Visions examines the context and societal consequences of technologies, technocratic governance, and development in Mexico, home of the first professional engineering school in the Americas. Contributors focus on the influential role of engineers, especially civil engineers, but also mining engineers, military engineers, architects, and other infrastructural and mechanical technicians. During the mid-nineteenth century, a period of immense upheaval and change domestically and globally, troubled governments attempted to expand and modernize Mexico’s engineering programs while resisting foreign invasion and adapting new Western technologies to existing precolonial and colonial foundations.
The Mexican Revolution in 1910 greatly expanded technocratic practices as state agents attempted to control popular unrest and unify disparate communities via science, education, and infrastructure. Within this backdrop of political unrest, Technocratic Visions describes engineering sites as places both praised and protested, where personal, local, national, and global interests combined into new forms of societal creation; and as places that became centers of contests over representation, health, identity, and power. With an eye on contextualizing current problems stemming from Mexico’s historical development, this volume reveals how these transformations were uniquely Mexican and thoroughly global.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 264
ISBN: 9780822966906
Pub Date: 28 Sep 2022
Series: Science, Values, and the Public
Description:
The public has voiced concern over the adverse effects of vaccines from the moment Dr. Edward Jenner introduced the first smallpox vaccine in 1796. The controversy over childhood immunization intensified in 1998, when Dr.
Andrew Wakefield linked the MMR vaccine to autism. Although Wakefield’s findings were later discredited and retracted, and medical and scientific evidence suggests routine immunizations have significantly reduced life-threatening conditions like measles, whooping cough, and polio, vaccine refusal and vaccine-preventable outbreaks are on the rise.This book explores vaccine hesitancy and refusal among parents in the industrialized North. Although biomedical, public health, and popular science literature has focused on a scientifically ignorant public, the real problem, Maya J. Goldenberg argues, lies not in misunderstanding, but in mistrust. Public confidence in scientific institutions and government bodies has been shaken by fraud, research scandals, and misconduct. Her book reveals how vaccine studies sponsored by the pharmaceutical industry, compelling rhetorics from the anti-vaccine movement, and the spread of populist knowledge on social media have all contributed to a public mistrust of the scientific consensus. Importantly, it also emphasizes how historical and current discrimination in health care against marginalized communities continues to shape public perception of institutional trustworthiness. Goldenberg ultimately reframes vaccine hesitancy as a crisis of public trust rather than a war on science, arguing that having good scientific support of vaccine efficacy and safety is not enough. In a fraught communications landscape, Vaccine Hesitancy advocates for trust-building measures that focus on relationships, transparency, and justice.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 298
ISBN: 9780822947028
Pub Date: 28 Sep 2022
Description:
This book examines the Slovak Question in former Czechoslovakia from an international perspective. Explored through the relationship between Slovaks, Slovak-Americans (many of them in Pittsburgh), and United States and Czechoslovak policymakers, it shows how Slovak national activism in America helped establish among the Slovaks a sense of independent identity and national political assertion, which troubled Czechoslovakian and European politics for seventy years. This divide had significant consequences when exploited by Nazi Germany and then by Cold War protagonists, and eventually led to the 'Velvet Divorce' between the two nations in 1993.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 332
ISBN: 9780822947189
Pub Date: 28 Sep 2022
Illustrations: 34 b&w illustrations
Description:
In 1972, the US Navy installed a base for nuclear submarines in the Archipelago of La Maddalena off the northeastern shore of Sardinia, Italy. In response, Italy established a radiation surveillance program to monitor the impact of the base on the environment and public health. In the first systematic study of nuclear expertise in Italy, Davide Orsini focuses on the ensuing technopolitical disputes concerning the role and safety of US nuclear submarines in the Mediterranean Sea from the Cold War period to the closure of the naval base in 2008.
His book follows the struggles of different groups--including local residents of the archipelago, US Navy personnel, local administrators, Italian experts, and politicians--to define nuclear submarines as either imperceptible threats, much like radiocontamination, or as efficient machines at the service of liberty and freedom. Unlike inland nuclear power plants, vividly present and visible with their tall cooling towers and reactor containers, the mobility and invisibility of submarines contributed to an ambivalence about their nature, perpetuating the idea of nuclear exceptionalism. In Italy, they symbolized objects in constant motion, easily removable at the first sign of potential harm. Orsini demonstrates how these mobile sources of hazard posed special challenges for both expert assessments and public understandings of risk, and in contexts outside the Anglo-Saxon world, where unique social power dynamics held sway over the outcome of technopolitical controversies.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 196
ISBN: 9780822947134
Pub Date: 28 Sep 2022
Description:
Street Matters links urban policy and planning with street protests in Brazil. It begins with the 2013 demonstrations that ostensibly began over public transportation fare increases but quickly grew to address larger questions of inequality. This inequality is physically manifested across Brazil, most visibly in its sprawling urban favelas.
The authors propose an understanding of the social and spatial dynamics at play that is based on property, labor, and security. They stitch together the history of plans for urban space with the popular protests that Brazilians organized to fight for property and land. They embed the history of civil society within the history of urban planning and its institutionalization to show how urban and regional planning played a key role in the management of the social conflicts surrounding land ownership. If urban and regional planning at times benefited the expansion of civil rights, it also often worked on behalf of class exploitation, deepening spatial inequalities and conflicts embedded in different city spaces.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 256
ISBN: 9780822946908
Pub Date: 28 Sep 2022
Series: Pitt Illuminations
Description:
Houses, in the Argentine and Chilean films of the early 21st-century, provide much more than a backdrop to on-screen drama. Nor are they simply refuges from political turmoil or spaces of oppression. This volume argues that domestic spaces are instead the medium through which new, fragile common identities are constructed.
The varied documentary and fiction films analyzed here – which include an early work by Oscar-winner Sebastián Lelio – use the domestic sphere as a laboratory in which to experiment with narrative, with audiovisual techniques, and with social configurations. Where previous scholarship has focused on the social fragmentation and political disillusionment visible in contemporary film, this book argues that in order to properly account for the political agency of cinema, it is necessary to move beyond deconstructive critical approaches to Latin American culture. In doing so, it expands the theoretical scope of studies in Latin American cinema by finding new points of contact between the cultural critique of Nelly Richard, the work of Bruno Latour, and theories of new materialism.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 314
ISBN: 9780822946212
Pub Date: 28 Sep 2022
Illustrations: 50 b&w illustrations
Description:
"Campbell takes the concept of regional identity and blows it up, showing that regional concerns were always mediated by national and international dynamics. This rich cultural history exposes the symbolic shorthand used to depict the Northeast and grants fresh insight into how actors constructed a regional identity with a variety of audiences in mind. The case studies presented here should interest students and tap into complex debates about representation and authenticity.
Region Out of Place reveals that the local concerns of northeasterners in Brazil were far from provincial, and exposes how deeply modern Brazil, even in its farthest regions, remained integrated within larger world currents." --Anadelia Romo, Texas State University "Students of regionalism have long acknowledged the impossibility of analyzing a region's history, politics, and culture apart from the nation. What is strikingly new and significant in Courtney J. Campbell's fascinating study of the Brazilian Northeast is her emphasis on the way the world beyond the nation served as a site for regional identity formation and as a resource for regionalists eager to demonstrate the centrality of the Northeast to the Brazilian nation and its vibrant culture. With chapters that explore such intriguing topics as wartime romances, World Cup soccer matches, and Miss Universe Pageants, Region out of Place offers not just an innovative perspective on the Brazilian Northeast but on the very question of how to understand regional identity." --Barbara Weinstein, New York University
Format: Paperback
Pages: 332
ISBN: 9780822966845
Pub Date: 28 Sep 2022
Description:
Homestead, The Households of a Mill Town, was first published in 1910 as one volume in the classic Pittsburgh Survey, and describes daily life in a community that was dominated economically and physically by the giant Homestead Works of the United States Steel Corporation. Homestead, just across the Monongahela River from Pittsburgh, developed as a completely separate city - a true mill town settled by newer immigrants and shaped in its attitudes by the infamous Homestead Strike of 1892. This edition includes a new foreword by Tom Waseleski, a journalist formerly of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, and features cover art by Pittsburgh artist Ron Donoughe.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 244
ISBN: 9780822947165
Pub Date: 28 Sep 2022
Description:
In the late eighteenth century, enlightened politicians and upper-class women in Spain debated the right of women to join one of the country’s most prominent scientific institutions: the Madrid Economic Society of Friends of the Country. Societies such as these, as Elena Serrano describes in her book, were founded on the idea that laypeople could contribute to the advancement of their country by providing “useful knowledge,” and their fellows often referred to themselves as improvers, or friends of the country. After intense debates, the duchess of Benavente, along with nine distinguished ladies, claimed, won, and exercised the right of women to participate in shaping the future of their nation by inaugurating the Junta de Damas de Honor y Mérito, or the Committee of Ladies of Honor and Merit.
Ten years later, the Junta established a network of over sixty correspondents extending from Tenerife to Asturias and Austria to Cuba. With this book, Serrano tells the unknown story of how the duchess and her peers - who succeeded in creating the only known female branch among some five hundred patriotic societies in the eighteenth century - shaped Spanish scientific culture. Her study reveals how the Junta, by stressing the value of their feminine nature in their efforts to reform education, rural economy, and the poor, produced and circulated useful knowledge and ultimately crystallized the European improvement movement in Spain within an otherwise all-male context.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 352
ISBN: 9780822947080
Pub Date: 28 Sep 2022
Description:
Imagining the Darwinian Revolution considers the relationship between the development of evolution and its historical representations by focusing on the so-called Darwinian Revolution. The very idea of the Darwinian Revolution is a historical construct devised to help explain the changing scientific and cultural landscape that was ushered in by Charles Darwin’s singular contribution to natural science. And yet, since at least the 1980s, science historians have moved away from traditional “great man” narratives to focus on the collective role that previously neglected figures have played in formative debates of evolutionary theory.
Darwin, they argue, was not the driving force behind the popularization of evolution in the nineteenth century. This volume moves the conversation forward by bringing Darwin back into the frame, recognizing that while he was not the only important evolutionist, his name and image came to signify evolution itself, both in the popular imagination as well as in the work and writings of other evolutionists. Together, contributors explore how the history of evolution has been interpreted, deployed, and exploited to fashion the science behind our changing understandings of evolution from the nineteenth century to the present.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 236
ISBN: 9780822947073
Pub Date: 28 Sep 2022
Description:
Psychic Investigators examines British anthropology’s engagement with the modern spiritualist movement during the late Victorian era. Efram Sera-Shriar argues that debates over the existence of ghosts and psychical powers were at the center of anthropological discussions on human beliefs. He focuses on the importance of establishing credible witnesses of spirit and psychic phenomena in the writings of anthropologists such as Alfred Russel Wallace, Edward Burnett Tylor, Andrew Lang, and Edward Clodd.
The book draws on major themes, such as the historical relationship between science and religion, the history of scientific observation, and the emergence of the subfield of anthropology of religion in the second half of the nineteenth century. For secularists such as Tylor and Clodd, spiritualism posed a major obstacle in establishing the legitimacy of the theory of animism: a core theoretical principle of anthropology founded in the belief of "primitive cultures" that spirits animated the world, and that this belief represented the foundation of all religious paradigms. What becomes clear through this nuanced examination of Victorian anthropology is that arguments involving spirits or psychic forces usually revolved around issues of evidence, or lack of it, rather than faith or beliefs or disbeliefs.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 384
ISBN: 9780822946960
Pub Date: 28 Sep 2022
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. In publication since 1970, and under Alejandro de la Fuente's editorial leadership since 2013, this interdisciplinary journal covers all aspects of Cuban history, politics, culture, diaspora, and more.
Cuban Studies 51 includes a dossier on Cuban social history.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 308
ISBN: 9780822947042
Pub Date: 28 Sep 2022
Illustrations: tk
Description:
A comprehensive, novel reassessment of the life and work of one of America's most influential self-taught artists, John Kane. The book presents a full account of Kane's life as a working man, including his time as a steelworker, coal miner, street paver, and commercial painter in and around Pittsburgh at the height of the industrial era. How these occupations shaped his development as an artist and his breakthrough success in the modern art world is carefully explored and analyzed in this richly illustrated volume.
Kane's dramatic life story demonstrates the power of perseverance and creativity: his dedication to painting resulted in a fascinating body of work that has ended up in some of America's most important museums and private collections.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 300
ISBN: 9780822946083
Pub Date: 28 Sep 2022
Series: The Correspondence of John Tyndall
Description:
This ninth volume of the Tyndall correspondence covers the period from February 1, 1865, to November 29, 1866. Tyndall was by now in his mid-forties and in the prime of life. His career as a man of science was firmly established and flourishing.
He had been professor of natural philosophy at the Royal Institution for more than a dozen years and established himself as Michael Faraday’s successor. This volume also covers the period of Faraday’s increasing illness and withdrawal from public life, which had a significant impact on Tyndall both personally and in terms of his standing in the scientific world.
