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The Art Of Drowning
Billy Collins
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995

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The Art of Freedom
Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and the Making of Modern India
Nico Slate
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024
Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay (1903–1988) was a prominent socialist, anticolonial and antiracist activist, champion of women’s rights, and advocate for the arts and crafts. Defying the borders of gender, nation, and race, her efforts spanned social movements and played a leading role in the creation of modern India and the development of the Global South. In The Art of Freedom, Nico Slate showcases new archival materials to document Kamaladevi’s campaign to become the first woman elected to provincial office; her confrontation with Gandhi that helped open the salt march of 1930 to women; her leadership of the All India Women’s Conference and the Congress Socialist Party; her pioneering work with refugees during the Partition of India in 1947; the major impact she had on the arts in postcolonial India; and her own career on the stage and screen. Slate also draws upon underexplored details from her personal life, providing new context for her experiences as a child widow, her remarriage to the mercurial actor/poet Harin Chattopadhyay, and her divorce (among the first civil divorces in modern India). Taken as a whole, Kamaladevi’s life offers a uniquely revealing vantage point on the making of modern India—a vantage point that centers the interconnections between struggles often seen as distinct, and that reminds us of the full promise of Indian democracy. 
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As Is
Poems
Julia Spicher Kasdorf
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023
As Is gathers everyday poems written over time and mostly at the poet’s home in the Ridge and Valley province of northern Appalachia. This work pays attention to the world as it is with curiosity, candor, and delight. Seeking connection with others and the earth and savoring the fine details of a messy life, these poems reckon with the demands of family, pandemic, aging, and loss even as they witness injustice, violence, environmental degradation, and climate crisis.  
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Ascent to Bankruptcy
Financing Social Security in Latin America
Carmelo Mesa-Lago
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989
In 1990, Carmelo Mesa-Lago, the foremost authority on social security in Latin America, concluded that all of the region's programs were imperiled, especially those in the most advanced nations.  His study of twenty countries, originally sponsored by the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America, critically reviews major financial problems, low and uneven population coverage, erosion in benefits, increasing costs, and the impact of social security on development.

In words that eerily echo current U.S. debates, Mesa-Lago analyzes virtually all social insurance programs: old age, disability and survivors' pensions; health care; occupational hazards; family allowances; and unemployment.  For social security specialists, this impressive study will serve as a comprehensive regional handbook on the legal, administrative, and financial features of Latin America's programs. Students of comparative policy and applied economics will find Mesa-Lago's methodology, analytical framework, and policy recommendations invaluable.
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Astoria
Malena Mörling
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006
Astoria examines the transitory physical world of the body and reflects on the seamless quality of the present moment. Surrounded by the rush and noise of trains, highways, and grocery store checkout lines, the narrator of these poems creates an intimate space in which to ponder the ephemeral nature of everyday things and the deeper meanings that might underlie them all. “It is amazing / we're not more amazed,” one poem muses, “The world / is here / and then it is gone.” The poems in Astoria unravel the hidden within the obvious, and speak to our innate questions of longing, purpose, and existence.
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Astronomy in India, 1784-1876
Joydeep Sen
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020
Indian scientific achievements in the early twentieth century are well known, with a number of heralded individuals making globally recognized strides in the field of astrophysics. Covering the period from the foundation of the Asiatick Society in 1784 to the establishment of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science in 1876, Sen explores the relationship between Indian astronomers and the colonial British. He shows that from the mid-nineteenth century, Indians were not passive receivers of European knowledge, but active participants in modern scientific observational astronomy.
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Asylum
Quan Barry
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001
Winner of the 2000 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize
2002 finalist in poetry, Society of Midland Authors

Quan Barry’s stunning debut collection has been compared to Sylvia Plath’s Ariel for the startling complexity of craft and the original sophisticated vision behind it. In these poems beauty is just as likely to be discovered on a radioactive atoll as in the existential questions raised by The Matrix.

Asylum  is a work concerned with giving voice to the displaced—both real and fictional. In "some refrains Sam would have played had he been asked" the piano player from Casablanca  is fleshed out in ways the film didn’t allow. Steven Seagal, Yukio Mishima, Tituba of the Salem Witch Trials, and eighteenth-century black poet Phillis Wheatley also populate these poems.

Barry engages with the world—the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, the legacy of the Vietnam war—but also tackles the broad meditative question of the individual’s existence in relation to a higher truth, whether examining rituals or questioning, "Where is it written that we should want to be saved?" Ultimately, <I>Asylum</I> finds a haven by not looking away.
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Asylum
Improvisations on John Clare
Lola Haskins
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019
Asylum presents the kind of journey John Clare might have taken in 1841 if, when he escaped the madhouse, he'd been traveling in his head rather than on his feet. Lola Haskins starts out with as little sense of direction as Clare had, and yet, after wandering all over the map, she too finally reaches her destination. The four sections in this book are where she rests for the night. The first looks tenderly at the cycle of human life. The second renders the world around her as if she were painting it. By the third, having lost her way, she turns to the supernatural and in the process is sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. The book ends as she finds it again and arrives in her dear north-west England, having learned from John Clare that she “can be homeless at home and half-gratified to find I can be happy anywhere.”
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At the Price of the Republic
Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party, 1929–1938
James Ramon Felak
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994

Slovak nationalist sentiment has been a constant presence in the history of Czechoslovakia, coming to head in the torrent of nationalism that resulted in the dissolution of the Republic on January 1, 1993.  James Felak examines a parallel episode in the 1930s with Slovak nationalists achieved autonomy for Slovakia-but “at the price” of the loss of East Central Europe's only parliamentary democracy and the strengthening of Nazi power.
   
The tensions between Czechs and Slovaks date back to the creation of Czechoslovakia in 1918. Slovaks, who differed sharply in political tradition, social and economic development, and culture, and resented being governed by a centralized administration run from the Czech capital of Prague, formed the Slovak People's Party, led by Roman Catholic priest Ankrej Hlinka. Drawing heavily on Czech and Slovak archives, Felak provides a balanced history of the party, offering unprecedented insight into intraparty factionalism and behind-the-scenes maneuvering surrounding SSP's policy decisions.

 

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At the Table of Power
Food and Cuisine in the African American Struggle for Freedom, Justice, and Equality
Diane Spivey
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022

At the Table of Power is both a cookbook and a culinary history that intertwines social issues, personal stories, and political commentary. Renowned culinary historian Diane M. Spivey offers a unique insight into the historical experience and cultural values of African America and America in general by way of the kitchen. From the rural country kitchen and steamboat floating palaces to marketplace street vendors and restaurants in urban hubs of business and finance, Africans in America cooked their way to positions of distinct superiority, and thereby indispensability. Despite their many culinary accomplishments, most Black culinary artists have been made invisible—until now. Within these pages, Spivey tells a powerful story beckoning and daring the reader to witness this culinary, cultural, and political journey taken hand in hand with the fight of Africans in America during the foundation years, from colonial slavery through the Reconstruction era. These narratives, together with the recipes from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, expose the politics of the day and offer insight on the politics of today. African American culinary artists, Spivey concludes, have more than earned a rightful place at the table of culinary contribution and power.

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Atlanta’s Water Wars
Technocracy, Racial Politics, and Environmental Activism, 1945–2005
Eric M. Hardy
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022
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Atlas of World Cultures
George Peter Murdock
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981

The publication of Murdock’s Ethnographic Atlas in 1967 marked the first time that descriptive information on the peoples of the world—primitive, historical, and contemporary—had been systematically organized for the purposes of comparative research. In this volume, Murdock has completely revised this work, selecting 563 societies that are most fully and accurately described in ethnographic literature. The identification of each society gives its geographical coordinates and date, its identifying number in the Ethnographic Atlas, and an indication of whether it is included in the Human Relations Area Files or the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample. In addition, bibliographical references are offered for each society.

The information and suggested research techniques will be of value to comparativists in anthropology, history, political science, psychology and sociology. Most importantly, it offers a simple method fro choosing a valid sample of the world’s known societies for cross-cultural research.

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The Atomic Archipelago
US Nuclear Submarines and Technopolitics of Risk in Cold War Italy
Davide Orsini
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022

Finalist, 2023 Turku Book Award
In 1972, the US Navy installed a base for nuclear submarines in the Archipelago of La Maddalena off the northeastern shore of Sardinia, Italy. In response, Italy established a radiation surveillance program to monitor the impact of the base on the environment and public health. In the first systematic study of nuclear expertise in Italy, Davide Orsini focuses on the ensuing technopolitical disputes concerning the role and safety of US nuclear submarines in the Mediterranean Sea from the Cold War period to the closure of the naval base in 2008. His book follows the struggles of different groups—including local residents of the archipelago, US Navy personnel, local administrators, Italian experts, and politicians—to define nuclear submarines as either imperceptible threats, much like radiocontamination, or efficient machines at the service of liberty and freedom.

Unlike inland nuclear power plants, vividly present and visible with their tall cooling towers and reactor containers, the mobility and invisibility of submarines contributed to an ambivalence about their nature, perpetuating the idea of nuclear exceptionalism. In Italy, they symbolized objects in constant motion, easily removable at the first sign of potential harm. Orsini demonstrates how these mobile sources of hazard posed special challenges for both expert assessments and public understandings of risk, and in contexts outside the Anglo-Saxon world, where unique social power dynamics held sway over the outcome of technopolitical controversies.

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Auction
Poems
Quan Barry
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023
Poems about the Freedom That Arises When We Finally Let Go 

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.  
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Authentic Writing
Jeffrey Rice
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021
In typical academic circles, texts must be critiqued, mined for the obfuscated meanings they hide, and shown to reveal larger, broader meanings than what are initially evident. To engage in this type of writing is to perform an authentic version of scholarship. But what if a scholar chooses instead to write without critique? What if they write about travelling, their children, food, grocery shopping, frozen garlic bread, sandwiches, condiments, falafel, yoga, and moments that normally wouldn’t be considered scholarly? Can the writing still be scholarly? Can scholarly writing be authentic if its topics comprise the everyday?

In Authentic Writing, Jeff Rice uses this question to trace a position regarding critique, the role of the scholar, the role of the personal in scholarship, the banal as subject matter, and the idea of authenticity. He explores authenticity as a writing issue, a rhetorical issue, a consumption issue, a culture issue, and an ideological issue. Rather than arguing for a more authentic state or practice, Rice examines the rhetorical features of authenticity in order to expand the focus of scholarship.
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Authoritarian Russia
Analyzing Post-Soviet Regime Changes
Vladimir Gel'man
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015
Russia today represents one of the major examples of the phenomenon of “electoral authoritarianism” which is characterized by adopting the trappings of democratic institutions (such as elections, political parties, and a legislature) and enlisting the service of the country’s essentially authoritarian rulers. Why and how has the electoral authoritarian regime been consolidated in Russia? What are the mechanisms of its maintenance, and what is its likely future course? This book attempts to answer these basic questions.
Vladimir Gel’man examines regime change in Russia from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 to the present day, systematically presenting theoretical and comparative perspectives of the factors that affected regime changes and the authoritarian drift of the country. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia’s national political elites aimed to achieve their goals by creating and enforcing of favorable “rules of the game” for themselves and maintaining informal winning coalitions of cliques around individual rulers. In the 1990s, these moves were only partially successful given the weakness of the Russian state and troubled post-socialist economy. In the 2000s, however, Vladimir Putin rescued the system thanks to the combination of economic growth and the revival of the state capacity he was able to implement by imposing a series of non-democratic reforms. In the 2010s, changing conditions in the country have presented new risks and challenges for the Putin regime that will play themselves out in the years to come.
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Authoritarianism and Corporatism in Latin America
James Malloy
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976
Since the mid-1960s it has been apparent that authoritarian regimes are not necessarily doomed to extinction as societies modernize and develop, but are potentially viable (if unpleasant) modes of organizing a society’s developmental efforts.  This realization has spurred new interest among social scientists in the phenomenon of authoritarianism and one of its variants, corporatism.

The sixteen previously unpublished essays in this volume provide a focus for the discussion of authoritarianism and corporatism by clarifying various concepts, and by pointing to directions for future research utilizing them.  The book is organized in four parts: a theoretical introduction; discussions of authoritarianism, corporatism, and the state; comparative and case studies; and conclusions and implications.  The essays discuss authoritarianism and corporatism in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela.
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Authoritarians and Democrats
Regime Transition in Latin America
James Malloy
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987

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Autobiography of a Wound
Brynne Rebele-Henry
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018

Winner of the AWP 2017 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry

In ancient fertility carvings, artists would drill holes into the woman’s body to signify penetrability, which is the basis of Autobiography of a Wound: allowing those wounds and puncture marks to speak through the fertility figures. The wounds are chronicled through letters and poems addressed to F (F stands for the fertility carvings themselves, which are being addressed as one unified deity), and A (Aphrodite, who is being referenced as a general deity of womanhood, a figurine that reappears throughout the poems, and a symbol that is referenced or portrayed in almost every fertility figurine or carving). Autobiography of a Wound reconstructs the narrative surrounding female pathos and the idea of the hysteric girl.

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Available Means
An Anthology Of Women'S Rhetoric(s)
Joy Ritchie
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001
“I say that even later someone will remember us.”—Sappho, Fragment 147, sixth century, BC

Sappho’s prediction came true; fragments of work by the earliest woman writer in Western literate history have in fact survived into the twenty-first century. But not without peril. Sappho’s writing remains only in fragments, partly due to the passage of time, but mostly as a result of systematic efforts to silence women’s voices. Sappho’s hopeful boast captures the mission of this anthology: to gather together women engaged in the art of persuasion—across differences of race, class, sexual orientation, historical and physical locations—in order to remember that the rhetorical tradition indeed includes them.

Available Means offers seventy women rhetoricians—from ancient Greece to the twenty-first century—a room of their own for the first time. Editors Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald do so in the feminist tradition of recovering a previously unarticulated canon of women’s rhetoric. Women whose voices are central to such scholarship are included here, such as Aspasia (a contemporary of Plato’s), Margery Kempe,  Margaret Fuller, and Ida B. Wells. Added are influential works on what it means to write as a woman—by Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, Nancy Mairs, Alice Walker, and Hélène Cixous. Public “manifestos” on the rights of women by Hortensia, Mary Astell, Maria Stewart, Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Anna Julia Cooper, Margaret Sanger, and Audre Lorde also join the discourse.

But Available Means searches for rhetorical tradition in less obvious places, too. Letters, journals, speeches, newspaper columns, diaries, meditations, and a fable (Rachel Carson’s introduction to Silent Spring) also find places in this room. Such unconventional documents challenge traditional notions of invention, arrangement, style, and delivery, and blur the boundaries between public and private discourse. Included, too, are writers whose voices have not been heard in any tradition. Ritchie and Ronald seek to “unsettle” as they expand the women’s rhetorical canon.

Arranged chronologically, Available Means is designed as a classroom text that will allow students to hear women speaking to each other across centuries, and to see how women have added new places from which arguments can be made. Each selection is accompanied by an extensive headnote, which sets the reading in context. The breadth of material will allow students to ask such questions as “How might we define women’s rhetoric?  How have women used and subverted traditional rhetoric?”

A topical index at the end of the book provides teachers a guide through the rhetorical riches. Available Means will be an invaluable text for rhetoric courses of all levels, as well as for women’s studies courses.
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The Avant-Garde and Geopolitics in Latin America
Fernando J. Rosenberg
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006

The Avant-Garde and Geopolitics in Latin America examines the canonical Latin American avant-garde texts of the 1920s and 1930s in novels, travel writing, journalism, and poetry, and presents them in a new light as formulators of modern Western culture and precursors of global culture. Particular focus is placed on the work of Roberto Arlt and Mário de Andrade as exemplars of the movement.

Fernando J. Rosenberg provides a theoretical historiography of Latin American literature and the role that modernity and avant-gardism played in it. He finds significant parallels between the cultural battles of the interwar years in Latin America and current debates over the role of the peripheral nation-state within the culture of globalization. Rosenberg establishes that the Latin American avant-garde evolved on its own terms, in polemic dialogue with the European movements, critiquing modernity itself and developing a global geopolitical awareness. In the process these writers created a bridge between postcolonial and postmodern culture, forming a distinct movement that continues its influence today.

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The Axion Esti
Odysseus Elytis
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979
The Axion Esti is probably the most widely read volume of verse to have appeared in Greece since World War II and remains a classic today. Those who follow the music of Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis have been especially drawn to Odysseus Elytis's work, his prose is widely considered a mirror to the revolutionary music of Theodorakis. The "autobiographical" elements are constantly colored by allusion to the history of Greece, thus, the poems express a contemporary consciousness fully resonant with those echoes of the past that have served most to shape the modern Greek experience.
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Azan on the Moon
Entangling Modernity along Tajikistan's Pamir Highway
Till Mostowlansky
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017
Azan on the Moon is an in-depth anthropological study of people’s lives along the Pamir Highway in eastern Tajikistan. Constructed in the 1930s in rugged high-altitude terrain, the road fundamentally altered the material and social fabric of this former Soviet outpost on the border with Afghanistan and China. The highway initially brought sentiments of disconnection and hardship, followed by Soviet modernization and development, and ultimately a sense of distinction from bordering countries and urban centers that continues to this day.
            Based on extensive fieldwork and through an analysis of construction, mobility, technology, media, development, Islam, and the state, Till Mostowlansky shows how ideas of modernity are both challenged and reinforced in contemporary Tajikistan. In the wake of China’s rise in Central Asia, people along the Pamir Highway strive to reconcile a modern future with a modern past. Weaving together the road, a population, and a region, Azan on the Moon presents a rich ethnography of global connections.
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