Originally founded in 1890, the University of Pennsylvania Press’s (UPP) innate mission is to advance the publication of books that aid scholarly research and educational objectives.
By long tradition, the Press has published distinct works in Cultural Studies, Urban Studies, and International Rights, now diversified to exemplary works in convergent areas of Jewish Studies, Political Science, and Social Sciences. Today, the Press publishes over 140 new titles and periodical issues each year, with an active backlist of more than 3,000 titles.
Award-Winning Highlights
CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2023
A Nation of Veterans
A Nation of Veterans examines how the United States created the world’s most generous system of veterans’ benefits. Though we often see former service members as an especially deserving group, the book shows that veterans had to wage a fierce political battle to obtain and then defend their advantages against criticism from liberals and conservatives alike. They succeeded in securing their privileged status in public policy only by rallying behind powerful interest groups, including the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Disabled American Veterans, and the American Legion. In the process, veterans formed one of the most powerful movements of the early and mid-twentieth century, though one that we still know comparatively little about.
In examining how the veterans’ movement inscribed martial citizenship onto American law, politics, and culture, A Nation of Veterans offers a new history of the U.S. welfare state that highlights its longstanding connection with warfare. It shows how a predominantly white and male group such as military veterans was at the center of social policy debates in the interwar and postwar period and how women and veterans of color were often discriminated against or denied access to their benefits. It moves beyond the traditional focus on the 1944 G.I. Bill to examine other important benefits like pensions, civil service preference, and hospitals. The book also examines multiple generations of veterans, by shedding light on how former service members from both world wars as well as Korea and the Cold War interacted with each other.
This more complete picture of veterans’ politics helps us understand the deep roots of the military welfare state in the United States today.
Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award 2023
Rose Mary Crawshay Prize 2023
Scripts of Blackness
Scripts of Blackness shows how the early modern mass media of theatre and performance culture at-large helped turn blackness into a racial category, that is, into a type of difference justifying emerging social hierarchies and power relations in a new world order driven by colonialism and capitalism.
In this book, Noémie Ndiaye explores the techniques of impersonation used by white performers to represent Afro-diasporic people in England, France, and Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, using a comparative and transnational framework. She reconstructs three specific performance techniques—black-up (cosmetic blackness), blackspeak (acoustic blackness), and black dances (kinetic blackness)—in order to map out the poetics of those techniques, and track a number of metaphorical strains that early modern playtexts regularly associated with them.
Those metaphorical strains, the titular scripts of blackness of this book, operated across national borders and constituted resources, as they provided spectators and participants with new ways of thinking about the Afro-diasporic people who lived or could/would ultimately live in their midst. Those scripts were often gendered and hinged on notions of demonization, exclusion, exploitation, animalization, commodification, sexualization, consensual enslavement, misogynoir, infantilization, and evocative association with other racialized minorities. Scripts of Blackness attempts to grasp the stories that Western Europeans told themselves through performative blackness, and the effects of those fictions on early modern Afro-diasporic subjects.
Best First Book in Native American and Indigenous Studies Prize 2023
The Great Power of Small Nations
In The Great Power of Small Nations, Elizabeth N. Ellis (Peoria) tells the stories of the many smaller Native American nations that shaped the development of the Gulf South. Based on extensive archival research and oral histories, Ellis’s narrative chronicles how diverse Indigenous peoples—including Biloxis, Choctaws, Chitimachas, Chickasaws, Houmas, Mobilians, and Tunicas—influenced and often challenged the growth of colonial Louisiana. The book centers on questions of Native nation-building and international diplomacy, and it argues that Native American migration and practices of offering refuge to migrants in crisis enabled Native nations to survive the violence of colonization.
Indeed, these practices also made them powerful. When European settlers began to arrive in Indigenous homelands at the turn of the eighteenth century, these small nations, or petites nations as the French called them, pulled colonists into their political and social systems, thereby steering the development of early Louisiana. In some cases, the same practices that helped Native peoples withstand colonization in the eighteenth century, including frequent migration, living alongside foreign nations, and welcoming outsiders into their lands, have made it difficult for their contemporary descendants to achieve federal acknowledgment and full rights as Native American peoples. The Great Power of Small Nations tackles questions of Native power past and present and provides a fresh examination of the formidable and resilient Native nations who helped shape the modern Gulf South.
UPP Copyright Year Collection
