Frederick Watts and the Founding of Penn State

Roger L. Williams

“Frederick Watts and the Founding of Penn State makes a compelling case for the national importance of Pennsylvania in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American social, political, and economic history. It also tells an intriguing, persuasive story that shows how Watts was an influential figure with implications far beyond the particulars of his time and place. Roger L. Williams continues his long record as one of our finest historians of higher education.”—John R. Thelin, author of Going to College in the Sixties

The Second Atlas of Breeding Birds in West Virginia

Edited by Richard S. Bailey and Casey B. Rucker

The Second Atlas of Breeding Birds in West Virginia is the most comprehensive description of bird life in the Mountain State ever published. Building on the first Atlas, published in 1994, this book documents the occurrence of 170 species of breeding birds, including three new species and one whose last breeding record was in 1888.

The Absent Image

Lacunae in Medieval Books

Elina Gertsman

“This is an intellectually ambitious, rigorously argued, and erudite book that explores visual strategies and their theoretical underpinnings of ‘empty spaces’ in medieval manuscripts. A must-read for scholars of medieval and northern Renaissance art and intellectual history.”—Nino Zchomelidse, author of Art, Ritual, and Civic Identity in Medieval Southern Italy

How Sherlock Pulled the Trick

Spiritualism and the Pseudoscientific Method

Brian McCuskey

“A detailed and insightful exposition of a powerful and compelling literary figure. We know Holmes is central to a late-Victorian worldview, and How Sherlock Pulled the Trick demonstrates how he is also significant today.”—Catherine Wynne, author of Lady Butler: War Artist and Traveller, 1846–1933

Menopause by MK Czerwiec is nominated for Best Anthology at this year’s Eisner Awards!

The Jewish Review of Books calls Hebrew Melodies, an illustrated edition of poems by Heinrich Heine, “a treasure”

The article “Port in a Storm: Arriving at a Virtual Theatre Through the Pandemic of 2020” by Alex Roe appeared in the most recent issue of The Eugene O’Neill Review. This article will be open from June 30–July 7.

We welcome William Westerman, the new editor of the journal Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy, a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary forum for pedagogical scholarship exploring intersections of identities, power, and social justice.

The PSU Press Journals Department is hiring!
View the available positions and apply here.

We are pleased to announce that Rachel Ginder has moved into the position of Journals Production Manager. Rachel has worked in the PSU Press Journals Department for six years and has been pivotal and instrumental in our growth. Congratulations, Rachel!

Age of Empires

The History and Administration of Judah in the 8th–2nd Centuries BCE in Light of the Storage-Jar Stamp Impressions

Oded Lipschits

This is the first attempt to consider the phenomenon stamped storage jars a whole and to develop a unified theory that would explain the function of these stamp impressions and shed new light on the history of Judah during six centuries of subjugation to the empires that ruled the region—as a vassal kingdom in the age of the Assyrian, Egyptian, and Babylonian empires and as a province under successive Babylonian, Persian, Ptolemaic, and Seleucid rule.

Cuneiform Texts from the Folios of W. G. Lambert, Part Two

Prepared for publication and edited by A. R. George and Junko Taniguchi

This book publishes 323 handcopies of cuneiform tablets found in the academic papers of W. G. Lambert (1926–2011), one of the foremost Assyriologists of the twentieth century. Prepared by A. R. George and Junko Taniguchi, it completes a two-part edition of Lambert’s previously unpublished handcopies.

Dirty Biology

The X-Rated Story of the Science of Sex

Léo Grasset, Illustrated by Colas Grasset

“The mix of giggle-inducing factoids and incisive scientific insights make this investigation of copulation well worth digging into”—Publishers Weekly

The Body Factory

From the First Prosthetics to the Augmented Human

Héloïse Chochois

“This surprisingly delightful and empathetic examination offers an exemplar in the graphic medicine genre”—Publishers Weekly