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: Hardback
Pages: 284
ISBN: 9780822947202
Pub Date: 31 Jan 2024
Description:
Although merit system selection and management of public personnel is thought of as the standard for good governance, public employees frequently are appointed by political officials rather than being members of a career civil service. In fact, there has been an increase in the level of patronage appointments and politicization of public administration over the past several decades as political leaders attempt to impose their control over the public bureaucracy. Although widespread, patronage appointments in the public sector are particularly important in Latin America, where there is a tradition of extensive patronage.
The Politics of Patronage Appointments in Latin American Central Administrations seeks to understand the motivations of patrons when they make appointments, the roles appointees play, the skills required to play these roles, and what accounts for different modalities of patronage. It moves beyond the conventional condemnation of patronage to examine the multiple uses of political appointments, which can be crucial for obtaining the services of highly qualified individuals who otherwise might not be willing to work in the public sector.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 432
ISBN: 9780822948025
Pub Date: 31 Jan 2024
Description:
Even more than thirty years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the role of the secret police in shaping culture and society in communist USSR has been difficult to study, and defies our complete understanding. In the last decade, the opening of non-Russian KGB archives, notably in Ukraine after 2015, has allowed scholars to explore state security organizations in ways not previously possible. Moving beyond well-known cases of high-profile espionage and repression, this study is the first to showcase research from a wide range of secret police archives in former Soviet republics and the countries of the former Soviet bloc—some of which are rapidly closing or becoming inaccessible once again.
Rather than focusing on Soviet leadership, The Secret Police and the Soviet System integrates the secret police into studies of information, technology, economics, art, and ideology. The result is a state-of-the-art portrait of one of the world’s most notorious institutions, the legacies of which are directly relevant for understanding Vladimir Putin’s Russia today.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 848
ISBN: 9780822947561
Pub Date: 31 Jan 2024
Description:
Environmental challenges are defining the twenty-first century. To fully understand ongoing debates about our current crises - climate change, loss of biological diversity, pollution, extinction, resource woes - means revisiting their origins, in all their complexity. With this ambitious, highly original contribution to the environmental history of global modernity, Frank Uekötter considers the many ways humans have had an impact on their physical environment throughout history.
Ours is not a one-way trajectory to sudden collapse, he argues, but rather death by a thousand cuts. The many paths we’ve forged to arrive in our current predicament, from agriculture to industry to infrastructure, must be considered collectively if we are to stay afloat in what Uekötter describes as a vortex: a powerful metaphor for the flow of history, capturing the momentum and the many crosscurrents that swept people and environments along. His book invites us to look at environmental challenges from multiple perspectives, including all the twists and turns that have helped to create the mess we find ourselves in. Uekötter has written a world history for an age where things are falling apart: where we know what lies ahead and are equipped with the right tools - technological and otherwise - and plenty of experience to deal with environmental challenges, but somehow fail to get our affairs in order.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 72
ISBN: 9780822967125
Pub Date: 31 Jan 2024
Description:
Trailer Park Psalms traces the speaker’s journey beyond his boyhood trailer park, through an American landscape marked by violence—from a gas line explosion in his hometown to his father’s war memories to the scars of colonialism inscribed in place, language, and ecology. Along the way, he searches for sources of awe that might inspire us, even in a compromised world: the everyday miracle of eyesight, the courage of the Voyager spacecrafts, and the “clumsy kindness” of family members trying to mend the damages of the past. In the end, what he finds isn’t faith but the hope that “if there’s a heaven, we will bend / to examine our old selves / and wonder how something so delicate / was ever allowed.
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Format: Hardback
Pages: 232
ISBN: 9780822947882
Pub Date: 31 Jan 2024
Description:
The BBC Latin American Service was created in 1938, funded by the British Ministry of Information, to counter fascist propaganda broadcast to Latin America. Now considered one of the major Latin American novelists of the twentieth century, Brazilian writer Antônio Callado (1917–1997) got his start writing radio drama scripts for the BBC LAS during and after World War II. Largely forgotten until Daniel Mandur Thomaz collected them in a 2018 volume published in Brazil, these radio scripts were propaganda in their own right and were part of a concerted effort to win sympathy for Britain and the Allies in Latin America.
They reveal how Callado’s experiences during the war influenced his writing and had a critical impact on themes he would revisit consistently throughout his literary career. Transatlantic Radio Dramas analyses the scripts themselves, but also examines the institutions, material practices, and beliefs that allowed modernist transatlantic networks like the BBC LAS to flourish.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 80
ISBN: 9780822967187
Pub Date: 31 Jan 2024
Description:
A Poetic Autobiography—Intimate, Sorrowful, and Funny Lynn Emanuel’s sixth collection of poetry is not sequential or straightforward. It has no conventional chronology, no master narrative. Instead, it is a life story, with all the chaos and messiness entailed therein.
Transcript of the Disappearance, Exact and Diminishing is a commotion of grief and wit, audacious images, poems, and paragraphs. It explores and centers on the possibilities and limitations of art in the face of disappearances of many kinds, including the disappearance that is most personal—the poet’s own.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 320
ISBN: 9780822946397
Pub Date: 31 Jan 2024
Description:
In general, “development” denotes movement or growth toward something better in the future. International development—widespread in the decades following World War II—was an effort at purposeful change in landscapes around the world. Contributors to this volume argue that these projects constituted an effort to transplant modernity, such as knowledge or technology, from places seen as more developed to places perceived as un- or underdeveloped.
During its heyday, international development included not just dams, roads, health programs, and agricultural projects but also animal husbandry schemes, urban development, and wildlife protection plans. Projects often succeeded or failed because of existing environmental conditions, and in turn, these programs remade—or tried to remake—the land, water, wildlife, and people around them. From American-directed failures in water engineering in Afghanistan to the impact of livestock epidemics on economic growth in East Africa, the chapters in Transplanting Modernity question how science, technology, and faith in Western notions of progress have influenced the pace, scope, and scale of development.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 280
ISBN: 9780822947776
Pub Date: 31 Jan 2024
Description:
Writing and Desire is a sustained, multimovement exploration of how writers, particularly queer writers, think and feel through desire as central to their writing practice. In a time of political, social, global, and ecological unrest, how might we understand desire - the desire for things to be different, the desire for a better world - as a crucial dimension of contemporary human experience? What might such a recentering of desire offer us, personally and politically?
And how is writing itself, as one of the primary ways through which we express and explore ourselves, central to the expression and exploration of desire? Drawing on recent theoretical work in queer theory and the new materialism, Jonathan Alexander studies a range of queer and trans writers and artists who center desire in their practice and argues that conceptualizing writing as desire allows us to reexperience both writing and our world as saturated with our dreams and wishes for change. In a book both elegant and unsettling, and by turns personal, analytic, and experimental, Alexander challenges us - and himself - to think about desire and writing as the deepest manifestation of our hopes for the future.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 352
ISBN: 9780822967095
Pub Date: 31 Jan 2024
Description:
First Published in 1984, this 40th Anniversary Edition of Youghiogheny is Revised and Expanded with a Beautiful New Cover Turbulent rapids and wild shorelines of the Youghiogheny River highlight natural wonders of the Appalachian Mountains, and midway on the stream’s revealing path, Ohiopyle State Park is a showcase of beauty and has become a recreational hotspot where the river thunders over its iconic falls and cascades through the wooded gorges of Pennsylvania. With deep reflection, a compelling sense of adventure, and family ties to the waterway going back many generations, author Tim Palmer wrote Youghiogheny: Appalachian River in 1984 as the essential biography of this river and region. Now, in this fortieth anniversary revised and expanded edition of his classic narrative on this special landscape and its people, he revisits the river, addresses the changes that have occurred since the book was first published, and poses the question: What will happen to this historic and cherished place?
Format: Hardback
Pages: 508
ISBN: 9780822947738
Pub Date: 31 Jan 2024
Description:
Authorities in postrevolutionary Cuba worked to establish a binary society in which citizens were either patriots or traitors. This all-or-nothing approach reflected in the familiar slogan “patria o muerte” (fatherland or death) has recently been challenged in protests that have adopted the theme song “patria y vida” (fatherland and life), a collaboration by exiles that, predictably, has been banned in Cuba itself. Lillian Guerra excavates the rise of a Soviet-advised Communist culture controlled by state institutions and the creation of a multidimensional system of state security whose functions embedded themselves into daily activities and individual consciousness and reinforced these binaries.
But despite public performance of patriotism, the life experience of many Cubans was somewhere in between. Guerra explores these in-between spaces and looks at Cuban citizens’ complicity with authoritarianism, leaders’ exploitation of an earnest anti-imperialist nationalism, and the duality of an existence that contains elements of both support and betrayal of a nation and of an ideology.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 200
ISBN: 9780822947820
Pub Date: 31 Jan 2024
Description:
The Ecuadorian Public Health Service was founded in 1908 in response to the arrival of bubonic plague to the country. A. Kim Clark uses this as a point of departure to explore questions of social history and public health by tracing how the service extended the reach of its broader programs across the national landscape and into domestic spaces.
Delving into health conditions in the country—especially in the highlands—and efforts to combat disease, she shows how citizens’ encounters with public health officials helped make abstract ideas of state government tangible. By using public health as a window to understand social relations in a country deeply divided by region, class, and ethnicity, Conjuring the State examines the cultural, social, and political effects of the everyday practices of public health officials.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 240
ISBN: 9780822947783
Pub Date: 31 Jan 2024
Description:
During the first decade of the century, Evo Morales and other leftists took control of governments across Latin America. In the case of Bolivia, Morales was that country’s first Indigenous president and was elected following five years of popular insurrection after decades of neoliberal governance. Now We Are in Power makes the argument that the so-called Pink Tide should be understood as a passive revolution, a process that has two phases: a period of subaltern struggle from average citizens strong enough to culminate in a political crisis, which is followed by a time of reconciliation and transformation.
Angus McNelly examines this movement as it unfolded and evaluates how passive revolution plays out over a prolonged crisis, ultimately demonstrating the inherent contradictions and complications of the process.
Pages: 264
ISBN: 9780822947912
Pub Date: 31 Jan 2024
Pages: 272
ISBN: 9780822967330
Pub Date: 19 Nov 2024
Description:
In From the Steel City to the White City, Zachary Brodt explores Western Pennsylvania’s representation at Chicago’s Columbian Exposition, the first major step in demonstrating that Pittsburgh was more than simply America’s crucible—it was also a region of developing culture and innovation. The 1893 Columbian Exposition presented a chance for the United States to prove to the world that it was an industrial giant ready to become a global superpower. At the same time, Pittsburgh, a commercial center that formerly served as a starting point for western expansion, found itself serving as a major transportation, and increasingly industrial, hub during this period of extensive growth.
Natural resources like petroleum and coal allowed Western Pennsylvania to become one of the largest iron- and steel-producing regions in the world. The Chicago fairgrounds provided a lucrative opportunity for area companies not only to provide construction materials but to display the region’s many products. While Pittsburgh’s most famous contributions to the 1893 World’s Fair—alternating current electricity and the Ferris wheel—had a lasting impact on the United States and the world, other exhibits provided a snapshot of the area’s industries, natural resources, and inventions. The success of these exhibits, Brodt reveals, launched local companies into the twentieth century, ensuring a steady flow of work, money, and prestige.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 80
ISBN: 9780822967170
Pub Date: 31 Jan 2024
Description:
In Auction, her first poetry collection in eight years, the poet, novelist, and playwright Quan Barry travels the globe in her signature quest into the existential nature of experience. These poems explore the inner landscapes of both the human and animal realms, revealing them to be points along the same spectrum. At the heart of the book lies an extended study of toxic storytelling as an element of warcraft, but Barry also contemplates the death of a Buddhist master, the plight of migrants both at home and abroad, the ethics of travel and consumption, and the larger question of how and why we construct a self in order to navigate the world.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 80
ISBN: 9780822966920
Pub Date: 31 Jan 2024
Description:
Winner of the Starrett PrizeAnuradha Bhowmik’s life as a Bangladeshi-born American girl growing up as a first-generation immigrant in the United States gives shape to this debut collection. Brown Girl Chromatography interrogates issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality in a post-9/11 America while navigating the poet’s millennial childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. The poems follow Bhowmik as she learns about the cruelties in both American and Bangladeshi worlds without any guidance or instruction on how to survive these conflicting spheres.
Any visible traces of her Bangladeshi life result in racial ridicule from her peers, while participating and assimilating into American culture is met with violence and abuse at home. As language and memory intersect, Bhowmik draws on pop culture and free association to examine her displacement from many angles and make meaning out of hurt.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 224
ISBN: 9780822947691
Pub Date: 31 Jan 2024
Description:
During Chile’s shift to neoliberalism, the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet passed a swath of probusiness labor legislation. Subsequent labor reforms by democratically elected progressive administrations have sought to shift power back to workers, but this task has proven difficult. In Building Power to Shape Labor Policy, Pablo Pérez Ahumada explains why.
Focusing on reforms to collective labor law, Pérez Ahumada argues that analyzing how both workers and employers mobilize power to influence government policies is crucial for understanding labor reform outcomes. He examines the relational character of power to explain how different types of power—structural, institutional, associational—interact with each other, and proposes a relational understanding of power and how it is balanced among competing social classes. While workers and employers both have a hand in shaping labor law, their influence is not equal. Analysis of recent events in Chile reveals how the balance of power and the lingering effects of neoliberalism manifest in labor reform.
