A Jewish Bestiary

Fabulous Creatures from Hebraic Legend and Lore

Mark Podwal

“A children’s book for grown-ups, A Jewish Bestiary is modest in appearance, broad in learning and deep in subtle humor.”—The New York Times

Deplorable

The Worst Presidential Campaigns from Jefferson to Trump

Mary E. Stuckey

“Stuckey brilliantly identifies when and how discourse degenerates to despicable and campaigns deteriorate to deplorable. I highly recommend her exquisitely written, lush, and lyrical exploration of these critical elections.”—Diane J. Heith, author of The Presidential Road Show: Public Leadership in an Era of Party Polarization and Media Fragmentation

School Choice and the Betrayal of Democracy

How Market-Based Education Reform Fails Our Communities

Robert Asen

“The affirmative and affirming vision of School Choice and the Betrayal of Democracy is one that rejects the ‘neutrality’ of ‘the market,’ and the habit of ignoring problems such as economic coercion, in favor of a world of interconnection. Asen’s elegant analysis of the (a)morality of neoliberalism is sure to be heavily cited for years to come.”—Patricia Roberts-Miller, author of Demagoguery and Democracy

What It Feels Like

Visceral Rhetoric and the Politics of Rape Culture

Stephanie R. Larson

“What It Feels Like is an exciting contribution to rhetorical studies and women’s and gender studies, offering a theory of visceral rhetoric that provides both explanatory power for rape culture and a potential framework for feminist intervention. It addresses a timely topic in a refreshingly new way, providing critical insight into how rape culture is rhetorically constituted as well as reason to hope for change.”—Elizabeth C. Britt, author of Reimagining Advocacy: Rhetorical Education in the Legal Clinic

Genealogies of Modernity calls Christian Nygren’s Titian’s Icons a “beautifully illustrated tome . . . interesting and challenging”

Deep Knowledge: Ways of Knowing in Sufism and Ifa, Two West African Intellectual Traditions by Oludamini Ogunnaike was awarded the Outstanding First Book Prize from the Association for the Study of The Worldwide African Diaspora.”

Reading Religion calls Responding to the Sacred: An Inquiry into the Limits of Rhetoric “a starting point for future works on the rhetoric of the sacred that rely on ethnographies.”

“In repurposing symbols of non- and anti-Jewish dominance, the page asserts a Jewish read of history and the animal kingdom,” says The Forward’s P.J. Grisar about A Jewish Bestiary, “exactly what a Jewish bestiary should do.”

PSU Press is excited to be part of the new Scholarly Publishing Collective! Learn more here.

New journals for 2022 include The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats, Journal for the History of Rhetoric, Methodist History, Theatre and Performance Notes and Counternotes, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research. See our full Journals catalog here.

Elementary Education in Early Second Millennium BCE Babylonia

Alhena Gadotti and Alexandra Kleinerman

In this volume, Alhena Gadotti and Alexandra Kleinerman investigate how Akkadian speakers learned Sumerian during the Old Babylonian period in areas outside major cities.

Camels in the Biblical World

Martin Heide and Joris Peters

Given the limited extrabiblical evidence for camels before circa 1000 BCE, a thorough investigation of the spatio-temporal history of the camel in the ancient Near and Middle East is necessary to understand their early appearance in the Hebrew Bible. A state-of-the-art evaluation of the cultural history of the camel and its role in the biblical world, this volume brings the humanities into dialogue with the natural sciences.

Hakim’s Odyssey

Book 1: From Syria to Turkey

Fabien Toulmé

“[A] stupendous testimony of survival”—starred review, Booklist

A Chance

Cristina Durán and Miguel Giner Bou

“Depict[s] distinct experiences in parenthood with love and charm in a graphic memoir that runs by turns from harrowing to lighthearted.”—Publishers Weekly