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: 200
ISBN: 9780822966401
Pub Date: 28 Jun 2021
Description:
Physicist John Tyndall and his contemporaries were at the forefront of developing the cosmology of scientific naturalism during the Victorian period. They rejected all but physical laws as having any impact on the operations of human life and the universe. Contributors focus on the way Tyndall and his correspondents developed their ideas through letters, periodicals and scientific journals and challenge previously held assumptions about who gained authority, and how they attained and defended their position within the scientific community.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 248
ISBN: 9780822966463
Pub Date: 28 Jun 2021
Description:
The nineteenth century saw science move from being the preserve of a small learned elite to a dominant force which influenced society as a whole. Sakurai presents a study of how scientific societies affected the social and political life of a city. As it did not have a university or a centralized government, Frankfurt am Main is an ideal case study of how scientific associations - funded by private patronage for the good of the local populace - became an important centre for natural history.
Regionalizing Science
Placing Knowledges in Victorian England
Format: Paperback
Pages: 264
ISBN: 9780822966425
Pub Date: 28 Jun 2021
Description:
Victorian England, as is well known, produced an enormous amount of scientific endeavour, but what has previously been overlooked is the important role of geography on these developments. Naylor seeks to rectify this imbalance by presenting a historical geography of regional science. Taking an in-depth look at the county of Cornwall, questions on how science affected provincial Victorian society, how it changed people’s relationship with the landscape and how it shaped society are applied to the Cornish case study, allowing a depth and texture of analysis denied to more general scientific overviews of the period.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 88
ISBN: 9780822966562
Pub Date: 28 Jun 2021
Description:
Peach State has its origins in Atlanta, Georgia, the author’s hometown and an emblematic city of the New South, a name that reflects the American region’s invigoration in recent decades by immigration and a spirit of reinvention. Focused mainly on food and cooking, these poems explore the city’s transformation from the mid-twentieth century to today, as seen and shaped by Chinese Americans. The poems are set in restaurants, home kitchens, grocery stores, and the houses of friends and neighbors.
Often employing forms - sonnet, villanelle, sestina, palindrome, ghazal, rhymed stanzas - they also mirror the constant negotiation with tradition that marks both immigrant and Southern experience.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 248
ISBN: 9780822966357
Pub Date: 28 Jun 2021
Description:
Winner of the Frank Watson Prize in Scottish History, 2011 The relationship between science and civil society is essential to our understanding of cultural change during the Victorian era. Science was frequently packaged as an appropriate form of civic culture, inculcating virtues necessary for civic progress. In turn, civic culture was presented as an appropriate context for enabling and supporting scientific progress.
Finnegan's study looks at the shifting nature of this process during the nineteenth century, using Scotland as the focus for his argument. Considerations of class, religion and gender are explored, illuminating changing social identities as public interest in science was allowed - even encouraged - beyond the environs of universities and elite metropolitan societies.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 240
ISBN: 9780822966326
Pub Date: 28 Jun 2021
Description:
The nineteenth century was an important period for both the proliferation of "popular" science and for the demarcation of a group of professionals that we now term scientists. Of course for Ireland, largely in contrast to the rest of Britain, the prominence of Catholicism posed various philosophical questions regarding research. Adelman’s study examines the practical educational impact of the growth of science in these communities, and the impact of this on the country’s economy; the role of museums and exhibitions in spreading scientific knowledge; and the role that science had to play in Ireland’s turbulent political context.
Adelman challenges historians to reassess the relationship between science and society, showing that the unique situation in Victorian Ireland can nonetheless have important implications for wider European interpretations of the development of this relationship during a period of significant change.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 200
ISBN: 9780822966432
Pub Date: 06 Jun 2021
Description:
This collection of essays explores the rise of scientific medicine and its impact on Victorian popular culture. Chapters include an examination of Charles Dickens’s involvement with hospital funding, concerns over milk purity and the theatrical portrayal of drug addiction, plus a whole section devoted to the representation of medicine in crime fiction. This is an interdisciplinary study involving public health, cultural studies, the history of medicine, literature and the theatre, providing new insights into Victorian culture and society.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 298
ISBN: 9780822966289
Pub Date: 05 Jun 2021
Description:
Toi Derricotte’s story is a hero’s journey - a poet earning her way home, to her own commanding powers. “I”: New and Selected Poems shows the reader both the closeness of the enemy and the poet’s inherent courage, inventiveness, and joy. It is a record of one woman’s response to the repressive and fracturing forces around the subjects of race, class, color, gender, and sexuality.
Each poem is an act of victory as the author finds her way through repressive forces to speak with beauty and truth. This collection features more than thirty new poems as well as selections from five previous collections.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 368
ISBN: 9780822946229
Pub Date: 05 Jun 2021
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.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 448
ISBN: 9780822945772
Pub Date: 05 Jun 2021
Series: The Correspondence of John Tyndall
Description:
The 318 letters in this volume reveal a great deal about Tyndall’s personality, the development of his career, and his role in attempting to better establish science as a respectable and professional enterprise. However, Tyndall was not above controversy, and on more than one occasion he entered public disputes either in defense of his own or a colleagues’ priority claims over scientific discoveries. Perhaps the most dramatic letters - if not those detailing the accounts of his cousin Hector Tyndale’s courageous exploits in the American Civil War - are those relating to Tyndall’s mountaineering adventures.
He climbed in pursuit of science, and often with only a guide, making an attempt on the Matterhorn just days after Edward Whymper had failed in the effort. Toward the end of this volume, Tyndall, Thomas Henry Huxley, and others acquired the Reader. Although short-lived, the journal intended to promote and publish the works, society meetings, and correspondence of scientific men, and demonstrates Tyndall’s commitment to the popularization of science and to facilitating communication within the international scientific community.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 270
ISBN: 9780822946359
Pub Date: 15 May 2021
Illustrations: 24 b&w
Description:
Gran Paradiso National Park is Italy’s oldest, and was instrumental in preventing the extinction of the Alpine ibex between World War I and just after World War II. Today, there are more than 30,000 ibex living in the Alps, all of which descended from that last colony protected in Gran Paradiso under Mussolini’s rule. Wilko Graf von Hardenberg merges the history of conservation with the area’s social history and Italy’s larger political history to produce a multifaceted narrative about the park as an institution, the conflicts it triggered, and practices adopted to manage the ibex despite hurdles placed by the fascist regime.
The book’s central argument is that, in fascist Italy, preservation - propaganda notwithstanding - was a product of the regime’s continuities with the previous liberal system. Italy’s total fascist transformation, accomplished only more than a decade after Mussolini took power, virtually unmade the early successes of preservation set in place by the nascent “nature state” in the regime’s early years. Despite this conflict, conservationists succeeded in preserving the ibex. Hardenberg positions this success within the broader history of science, conservation, and tourism in fascist Italy and the Alpine region, creating a comprehensive historical background and comparative reference to ongoing debates about the role of nature conservation in general and in relation to the state and its agencies.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 264
ISBN: 9780822946526
Pub Date: 15 May 2021
Illustrations: 32 b&w
Description:
Built on an estuary, New York City is rich in population and economic activity but poor in available land to manage the needs of a modern city. Since consolidation of the five boroughs in 1889, New York has faced innumerable challenges, from complex water and waste management issues, to housing and feeding millions of residents in a concentrated area, to dealing with climate change in the wake of Superstorm Sandy, and everything in between. Any consideration of sustainable urbanism requires understanding how cities have developed the systems that support modern life and the challenges posed by such a concentrated population.
As the largest city in the United States, New York City is an excellent site to investigate these concerns. Featuring an array of the most distinguished and innovative urban environmental historians in the field, Coastal Metropolis offers new insight into how the modern city transformed its air, land, and water as it grew.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 272
ISBN: 9780822946427
Pub Date: 15 May 2021
Illustrations: 50 color illus.
Description:
Most people view cultural heritage sites as static places, frozen in time. In Cultural Landscapes in India, Amita Sinha subverts the idea of heritage as static and examines the ways that landscapes influence culture and that culture influences landscapes. The book centers around imagining, enacting, and reclaiming landscapes as subjects and settings of living cultural heritage.
Drawing on case studies from different regions of India, Sinha offers new interpretations of links between land and culture using different ways of seeing - transcendental, romantic, and utilitarian. The idea of cultural landscape can be seen in ancient practices such as circumambulation and immersion in bodies of water that sustain engagement with natural elements. Pilgrim towns, medieval forts, religious sites, and contemporary memorial parks are sites of memory where myth and history converge. Engaging with these spaces allows us to reconstruct collective memory and reclaim not only historic landscapes, but ways of seeing, making, and remembering. Cultural Landscapes in India makes the case for reclaiming iconic landscapes and rethinking conventional approaches to conservation that take into consideration performative landscape as heritage.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 296
ISBN: 9780822946045
Pub Date: 15 May 2021
Illustrations: 25 b&w illustrations
Description:
Food policy and practices varied widely in Nicaragua during the last decades of the twentieth century. In the 1970s and ‘80s, food scarcity contributed to the demise of the Somoza dictatorship and the Sandinista revolution. Although faced with widespread scarcity and political restrictions, Nicaraguan consumers still carved out spaces for defining their food choices.
Despite economic crises, rationing, and war limiting peoples’ food selection, consumers responded with improvisation in daily cooking practices and organizing food exchanges through three distinct periods. First, the Somoza dictatorship (1936-1979) promoted culture and food practices from the United States, which was an option only for a minority of citizens. Second, the 1979 Sandinista revolution tried to steer Nicaraguans away from mass consumption by introducing an austere, frugal consumption that favored local products. Third, the transition to democracy between 1988 and 1993, marked by extreme scarcity and economic crisis, witnessed the re-introduction of market mechanisms, mass advertising, and imported goods. Despite the erosion of food policy during transition, the Nicaraguan revolution contributed to recognizing food security as a basic right and the rise of peasant movements for food sovereignty.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 96
ISBN: 9780822966586
Pub Date: 15 May 2021
Description:
Holoholo is the Hawaiian word for walking out with no destination in mind. In the three sections of this book, Barbara Hamby walks out into the current American chaos with its inferno of wars, street violence, apocalyptic fantasies, and racial tension. Fueled by an American lingo that embraces slang, Yiddish, street talk, and the yearning to be able to describe her moment in time, these poems encompass the complicated past, difficult present, and unknown future.
Every foray offers a glimpse of the world constructed from one woman's collage of consciousness.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 408
ISBN: 9780822946472
Pub Date: 15 May 2021
Illustrations: 191 color & b&w
Description:
Part art book and part biography, Magnetic Woman examines the life and work of the artist Toyen (Marie Čermínová, 1902-80), a founding member of the Prague surrealist group, and focuses on her construction of gender and eroticism. Toyen’s early life in Prague enabled her to become a force in three avant-garde groups - Devětsil, Prague surrealism, and Paris surrealism - yet, unusually for a female artist of her generation, Toyen presented both her gender and sexuality as ambiguous and often emphasized erotic themes in her work. Despite her importance and ground-breaking work, Toyen has been notoriously difficult to study.
Using primary sources gathered from disparate disciplines and studies of the artist’s own work, Magnetic Woman is organized both chronologically and thematically, moving through Toyen’s career with attention to specific historical circumstances and intellectual developments approximately as they entered her life. Karla Huebner offers a re-evaluation of surrealism, the Central European contribution to modernism, and the role of female artists in the avant-garde, along with a complex and nuanced view of women’s roles in and treatment by the surrealist movement.
