Founded in 1956, Penn State University Press publishes rigorously reviewed, high-quality works of scholarship and books of regional and contemporary interest, with a focus on the humanities and social sciences.
The publishing arm of the Pennsylvania State University and a division of the Penn State University Libraries, the Press promotes the advance of scholarship by disseminating knowledge—new information, interpretations, methods of analysis—widely in books, journals, and digital publications.
Penn State University Press Highlights
Keystone Poetry
From Philadelphia to Erie, and from the shale fields to the coal mines, Keystone Poetry celebrates the varied landscapes and voices of Pennsylvania. This collection brings together the work of 182 poets who, with keen eyes and sharp language, commemorate the hometowns, history, traditions, and culture of the Commonwealth.
Organized geographically, the poems traverse county lines, ancestral lineage, and thematic concerns—as well as gender, racial, and socioeconomic barriers. The poems in this collection seek to bring the reader close to home, while simultaneously fostering discovery of new places and a deeper understanding of all those who live in the Keystone state.
Depicting the Holy War
A revealing examination of how mural paintings show the sacralization of violence in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Depicting the Holy War examines the impact that crusades in the Middle East had on societies in western Europe through the analysis of a heretofore largely ignored type of source: mural paintings.
Chaucer and Trauma
This timely volume explores depictions of violence, victimhood, and overwhelming grief or loss in Chaucer’s most ambitious texts, Troilus and Criseyde and the Canterbury Tales. The authors examine layers of deep emotional suffering in Chaucer’s works, as well as those forces that perpetrate injustices against human beings. The essays scrutinize Chaucer’s narratives through close textual analysis and modern theoretical approaches, offering original perspectives and treating subjects relevant to contemporary concerns—rape, domestic violence, slavery, forced consent, family separation, natural catastrophe, pandemic, and more.
Penn State University Press Copyright Year Collections
