Penn Press Log

This Week's New Books

Varieties of Sovereignty and Citizenship Edited by Sigal R. Ben-Porath and Rogers M. Smith 352 pages | 6 x 9 Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4456-4 | $79.95 | £52.00 Ebook 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-0748-4 | $79.95 | £52.00 A volume in the Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism series "Excellent, engaging, and enriching, the essays of Varieties of Sovereignty and Citizenship pursue a wide spectrum of political and methodological approaches to address the state of the national state in the current globalizing moment."--Linda S. Bosniak, Rutgers School of Law-Camden A broad range of scholars from different disciplines reflect on the likely transformation of the world away from the absolute sovereignty of independent nation-states to the proliferation of varieties of plural citizenship, and on the emergence of possible new forms of allegiance.

Now in Paperback Women Warriors for Allah: An Islamist Network in the Netherlands Janny Groen and Annieke Kranenberg. Translated by Robert Naborn. Foreword by Marc Sageman 280 pages | 6 x 9 Cloth 2010 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4235-5 | $75.00 | £49.00 Paper 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-2233-3 | $29.95 | £19.50 Dutch investigative journalists Janny Groen and Annieke Kranenberg offer an indispensable corrective to the conventional view that Muslim women in jihad are either pacifist nurturers who steer their husbands and brothers away from violence or passive bystanders who play a mere supporting role in networks run by domineering men.

Preparing Today's Students for Tomorrow's Jobs in Metropolitan America Edited by Laura W. Perna 328 pages | 6 x 9 | 14 illus. Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4453-3 | $65.00 | £42.50 Ebook 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-0843-6 | $65.00 | £42.50 A volume in the City in the Twenty-First Century series Written by researchers in education and urban policy, this volume offers useful insights into how to provide urban workers with the educational qualifications they need for real world jobs.

Now in Paperback Sound, Space, and the City: Civic Performance in Downtown Los Angeles Marina Peterson 200 pages | 6 x 9 | 14 illus. Cloth 2010 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4234-8 | $39.95 | £26.00 Paper 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-2236-4 | $22.50 | £15.00 Ebook 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-0770-5 | $22.50 | £15.00 A volume in the City in the Twenty-First Century series In Sound, Space, and the City, Marina Peterson explores the processes—from urban renewal to the performance of ethnicity and the experiences of audiences—through which civic space is created at music performances in downtown Los Angeles.

Now in Paperback Asymmetric Autonomy and the Settlement of Ethnic Conflicts Edited by Marc Weller and Katherine Nobbs 360 pages | 6 x 9 | 2 illus. Cloth 2010 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4230-0 | $59.95 | £39.00 Paper 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-2238-8 | $29.95 | £19.50 Ebook 2011 | ISBN 978-0-8122-0575-6 | $29.95 | £19.50 A volume in the National and Ethnic Conflict in the 21st Century series "A useful collection of articles that analyses issues of autonomy and asymmetry from a multi-dimensional perspective."--International Journal on Minority and Group Rights This collection of new case studies assesses the ability of asymmetrical autonomy agreements to resolve violent struggles between central governments and separatist groups within their borders.

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Saunders Robinson. Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

This Week's New Books: Animal Encounters, Intimate Enemies, and Next Year in Marienbad

Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain Susan Crane 296 pages | 6 x 9 | 11 illus. Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-4458-8 | $59.95 | £39.00 Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-0630-2 | $59.95 | £39.00 A volume in the Middle Ages Series Thinking about animals and living with them are vital aspects of medieval experience. Animal Encounters explores saints' lives, hunting treatises, bestiaries, and other genres to discover how various species take part in culture making, revealing that cross-species relationships transform both their animal and their human participants.

Intimate Enemies: Violence and Reconciliation in Peru Kimberly Theidon 488 pages | 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 | 2 illus. Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-4450-2 | $75.00 | £49.00 Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-0661-6 | $75.00 | £49.00 A volume in the Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights series "A very important work for the fields of anthropology and human rights. . . . Intimate Enemies is a unique, path-breaking ethnography of community responses to situations of extreme violence, of the clash of armed rebels seeking to overthrow the state and counterinsurgency soldiers."--Kay Warren, Brown University Drawing on years of research in the highlands of Ayacucho, Kimberly Theidon explores how Peruvians are rebuilding individual lives and collective existence following twenty years of armed conflict. The micropolitics of reconciliation practiced there complicates the way we understand transitional justice and coexistence in the aftermath of war.

Next Year in Marienbad: The Lost Worlds of Jewish Spa Culture Mirjam Zadoff. Translated by William Templer 320 pages | 6 x 9 | 20 illus. Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-4466-3 | $49.95 | £32.50 Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-0755-2 | $49.95 | £32.50 A volume in the Jewish Culture and Contexts series "A charming, highly readable, and scholarly contribution to the cultural history of the Jewish bourgeoisie of central and eastern Europe. With wit and learning Mirjam Zadoff has elevated Marienbad to the rank of a Jewish 'lieu de mémoire.'"--Saul Friedlander, University of California, Los Angeles Next Year in Marienbad draws an engaging portrait of Jewish presence and cultural production in the spa towns of Carlsbad, Marienbad, and Franzensbad, from the last decades of the nineteenth century through the late 1930s.

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Saunders Robinson. Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

Paul's Pick: a Free Article on the Cost of Higher Education from Dissent

Every month, Paul Chase in the Penn Press Journals department invites our blog readers to download a complimentary article from one of our many scholarly journals.

Paul's pick for November is "The Corporatization of Higher Education"  by Nicholaus Mills, professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College. The article appears in the Fall 2012 issue of Dissent. Mills writes:

When our current period of slow economic growth will end is anybody’s guess, but even when it does end, colleges and universities will certainly not be rolling back their prices. These days, it is not just the economic climate in which our colleges and universities find themselves that determines what they charge and how they operate; it is their increasing corporatization.

 

Click here to download this free article and learn more about Dissent, a quarterly publication of politics and culture that ranks among the handful of political journals read most regularly by U.S. intellectuals.

Check the Penn Press Log in December for Paul's next pick.

This Week's New Books: Between North and South, The Sovereign Citizen, and Capricious Fancy

Between North and South: Delaware, Desegregation, and the Myth of American Sectionalism Brett Gadsden 352 pages | 6 x 9 | 13 illus. Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-4443-4 | $45.00 | £29.50 Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-0797-2 | $45.00 | £29.50 A volume in the Politics and Culture in Modern America series Between North and South chronicles the three-decades-long struggle over segregated schooling in Delaware, a key border state and important site of civil rights activism and white reaction, that despite concerted white opposition to reforms produced one of the most progressive desegregation remedies in the nation.

The Sovereign Citizen: Denaturalization and the Origins of the American Republic Patrick Weil 224 pages | 6 x 9 Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-2212-8 | $34.95 | £23.00 Ebook | ISBN 978-0-8122-0621-0 | $34.95 | £23.00 A volume in the Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism series Present-day Americans may feel secure in their citizenship, but there was a time when citizens could be denationalized. Patrick Weil examines the twentieth-century legal procedures, causes, and enforcement of denaturalization to illuminate an important and neglected dimension of American citizenship, sovereignty, and federal authority.

Capricious Fancy: Draping and Curtaining the Historic Interior, 1800-1930 Gail Caskey Winkler. Foreword by Roger Moss 408 pages | 9 1/2 x 11 | 293 color illus. Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-8122-4322-2 | $85.00 | £55.50 Capricious Fancy chronicles the changes in American and European curtain and drapery styles from 1800 to 1930 resulting from the Industrial Revolution. This lavishly illustrated book contains 325 rare archival images and historical commentary from a leading historic preservation educator and practitioner.

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Saunders Robinson. Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

Around the World with Penn Press

You may not need a map to see that scholarly publishers like Penn Press contribute to the world's knowledge and understanding, but it does provide an interesting perspective.

As part of the Univeristy Press Week celebration, Penn Press has created a special Google map to show the reach of our authors and publications. In the Fall 2012 season alone, we touched every continent except Antarctica. (Oh, well. Maybe next season.)

View University of Pennsylvania Press Influence Map in a larger map

For links to other university press maps and details on University Press Week events, visit www.universitypressweek.org.

This Week's New Books: The City After Abandonment, This Noble House, Pornographic Archaeology, and The Language of Human Rights in West Germany

The City After Abandonment Edited by Margaret Dewar and June Manning Thomas 400 pages | 6 x 9 | 25 illus Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4446-5 | $75.00 | £49.00 Ebook 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-0730-9 | $75.00 | £49.00 A volume in the City in the Twenty-First Century series Looking at the shrinking cities of the Midwest and Northeast as well as New Orleans, urban planning experts examine the conditions of disinvested places and lay out ways policymakers and planners can approach the future through processes and ideas that differ from those applicable to growing cities.

This Noble House: Jewish Descendants of King David in the Medieval Islamic East Arnold E. Franklin 320 pages | 6 x 9 | 5 illus. Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4409-0 | $65.00 | £42.50 Ebook 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-0640-1 | $65.00 | £42.50 A volume in the Jewish Culture and Contexts series "A substantial, rich, and original work that takes a typically Jewish topic into the heart of an Islamic cultural context."--Menahem Ben-Sasson, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem This Noble House examines the importance of biblical ancestry—especially the claim of descent from King David—for Jews living in the medieval Islamic world.

Pornographic Archaeology: Medicine, Medievalism, and the Invention of the French Nation Zrinka Stahuljak 352 pages | 6 x 9 | 11 illus. Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4447-2 | $75.00 | £49.00 Ebook 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-0731-6 | $75.00 | £49.00 Pornographic Archaeology uncovers the determinant role that the sexuality of the Middle Ages played in the construction of nineteenth-century French nation and empire. This cultural history demonstrates how medicine's obsession with the medieval past helped to define European sexuality, race, marriage, and family.

The Language of Human Rights in West Germany Lora Wildenthal 288 pages | 6 x 9 Cloth 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4448-9 | $69.95 | £45.50 Ebook 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-0729-3 | $69.95 | £45.50 A volume in the Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights series "This is a special book: well-grounded, thoughtful, polished, and responsible. Lora Wildenthal has written an important work that goes far beyond the usual praise and will be greatly appreciated as a landmark study about both postwar German history and about human rights history."--Samuel Moyn, Columbia University The Language of Human Rights in West Germany traces the four most important purposes for which West Germans invoked human rights after World War II. Lora Wildenthal demonstrates that human rights comprise a political language, best understood in its own domestic and historical context.

Book reviewers: to request a press copy, contact Saunders Robinson. Educators: to request an exam copy for course use consideration, click here.

Early Modern Monday: Where In the World is Tecamachalco?

Poor Tecamachalco, so unfortunate,
it never lacks some misfortune!
Diego de Trujillo, Spanish farmer, 1581

On July 21, 1578, the small Mexican town of Tecamachalco awoke to the news of a scandal. Nailed to the door of its church was a double-faced effigy denouncing Hernando Rubio Naranjo as a Jew who should burn at the stake. In Death by Effigy: A Case from the Mexican Inquisition, historian Luis R. Corteguera recounts the nine trials that followed this incident, revealing a story of dishonor, revenge, and the Inquisition's relentless determination to defend its symbols.

The rich history of Tecamachalco, now a municipality in the Mexican state of Puebla, plays an important role in the inquisitorial investigation into the misuse of church symbols. The following excerpt from Corteguera's new book sets the stage for a drama of social anxieties and religious authority.

.
View Larger Map

The menacing effigy of San Benito stood guard, waiting for everyone in Tecamachalco to heed its warnings. Meanwhile, across from the church, Hernando Rubio Naranjo slept inside his house, unaware of the scandal that would soon spread across the region.

This Month's Podcast: David R. Swartz and the Evangelical Left

In the November Penn Press podcast, David R. Swartz, Assistant Professor at Asbury University and author of Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism, discusses the overlooked history of progressive evangelical Christians in the United States.

In this section of the interview, Swartz describes the differences between fundamentalist Christians and other evangelical believers:

Evangelicalism--often called neoevangelicalism to distinguish it from nineteenth-century versions of it--came out of fundamentalism. This was a more separatist movement. And this was the era in which Methodists and Baptists and Presbyterians are starting to split along fundamentalist and modernist lines. Neoevangelicals came in the wake of that and wanted to reengage the world. They were less separatist, and they were less fired up in some ways.

When you see a conservative Christian, say, railing against gays on a YouTube video, that’s almost always a fundamentalist. The pithiest way to say this is that a fundamentalist is an evangelical who’s angry about something. Now unfortunately in the popular imagination, the word evangelical has come to mean fundamentalist. So there’s a historical part to this, but there’s also a temperamental  aspect to these two movements.

David Swartz, author of Moral Minority by PennPress

The complete interview is available at the Penn Press podcast page.