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      • Stanford University Press

        Founded in 1892, Stanford University Press publishes 130 books a year across the humanities, social sciences, law, and business. Our books inform scholarly debate, generate global and cross-cultural discussion, and bring timely, peer-reviewed scholarship to the wider reading public. Numerous recent accolades include the Hayek Book Award and an NAACP Image Award nomination, while our authors and their books frequently appear in impactful media outlets such as the New York Times and NPR as well as in leading academic journals. Readers can find SUP titles at physical and online retailers around the world. At the leading edge of both print and digital dissemination of innovative research, with more than 3,000 books currently in print, SUP is a publisher of ideas that matter, books that endure.

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      • Trusted Partner
        July 2021

        My Life with Viruses

        A researcher’s history of the fascinating world of pathogens

        by Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker in association with Jeanne Rubner

        In times of the coronavirus pandemic many people have certainly condemned them, but Professor Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker has dedicated his life to researching them and is intrigued by viruses – even if sometimes he is keenly aware of their fatal effects. To mark his 80th birthday the biochemist describes the co-evolution and co-existence as well as the eternal ‘battle’ between humans and viruses. Winnacker takes up the cause of these ‘biological elements between animate and inanimate nature’ because they play an important role in fundamental research and genetic technology, and without them human beings would not be what they are.

      • Trusted Partner
        Science & Mathematics
        September 2024

        The elephant and the dragon in contemporary life sciences

        A call for decolonising global governance

        by Joy Y. Zhang, Saheli Datta Burton

        This book provides a powerful diagnosis of why the global governance of science struggles in the face of emerging powers. Through unpacking critical events in China and India over the past twenty years, it demonstrates that the 'subversiveness' assumed in the two countries' rise in the life sciences reflects many of the regulatory challenges that are shared worldwide. It points to a decolonial imperative for science governance to be responsive and effective in a cosmopolitan world. By highlighting epistemic injustice within contemporary science, the book extends theories of decolonisation.

      • Trusted Partner
        Business, Economics & Law
        May 2024

        Governance, democracy and ethics in crisis-decision-making

        The pandemic and beyond

        by Caroline Redhead, Melanie Smallman

        This book is a powerful addition to a developing literature informed by arts and humanities research carried out during the COVID-19 pandemic. Investigating the impacts of crisis governance and decision-making on people and populations, the book brings together microbial organisms and humans, children and data, decision-making and infection prevention, publics and process, global vaccine distribution and citizens' juries. Through its eight chapters, the book stimulates broadly-drawn discussions about exceptional executive powers in an emergency, the role of trust, and the importance of the principles of good governance - such as selflessness, ethics, integrity, accountability and honesty in leadership. The lessons drawn out in this book will support future decision-makers in both ordinary times and extra-ordinary emergencies.

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        Humanities & Social Sciences
        April 2024

        Women in exile in early modern Europe and the Americas

        by Linda Levy Peck, Adrianna E. Bakos

        Exile, its pain and possibility, is the starting point of this book. Women's experience of exile was often different from that of men, yet it has not received the important attention it deserves. Women in exile in early modern Europe and the Americas addresses that lacuna through a wide-ranging geographical, chronological, social and cultural approach. Whether powerful, well-to-do or impoverished, exiled by force or choice, every woman faced the question of how to reconstruct her life in a new place. These essays focus on women's agency despite the pressures created by political, economic and social dislocation. Collectively, they demonstrate how these women from different countries, continents and status groups not only survived but also in many cases thrived. This analysis of early modern women's experiences not only provides a new vantage point from which to enrich the study of exile but also contributes important new scholarship to the history of women.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2020

        The life–cycle in Western Europe, c.1300–c.1500

        by S. H. Rigby, Deborah Youngs

        This is the first study to examine the entire life cycle in the Middle Ages. Drawing on a wide range of secondary and primary material, the book explores the timing and experiences of infancy, childhood, adolescence and youth, adulthood, old age and, finally, death. It discusses attitudes towards ageing, rites of passage, age stereotypes in operation, and the means by which age was used as a form of social control, compelling individuals to work, govern, marry and pay taxes. The wide scope of the study allows contrasts and comparisons to be made across gender, social status and geographical location. It considers whether men and women experienced the ageing process in the same way, and examines the differences that can be discerned between northern and southern Europe. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries suffered famine, warfare, plague and population collapse. This fascinating consideration of the life cycle adds a new dimension to the debate over continuity and change in a period of social and demographic upheaval.

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        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2025

        Serving the public

        The good food revolution in schools, hospitals and prisons

        by Kevin Morgan

        A revealing account of what we feed our citizens in schools, hospitals and prisons. Access to good food is the litmus test of a society's commitment to social justice and sustainable development. This book explores the 'good food revolution' in public institutions, asking what broader lessons can be learned. In schools the book examines the challenge of the whole school approach, where the message of the classroom is being aligned with the offer of the dining room. In hospitals it looks at the struggle to put nutrition on a par with medicine and shape a health service worthy of the name. And in prisons it shows how good food can bring hope and dignity to prisoners, helping them to rehabilitate themselves. Drawing on evidence from the UK and the US, Serving the public highlights how public institutions are harnessing the power of purchase to secure public health, social justice and ecological integrity. The quest for good food in these institutions is an important part of the struggle to redeem the public sphere and repair the damage wrought by forty years of neoliberalism.

      • Trusted Partner
        Anthropology
        March 2017

        Ageing selves and everyday life in the north of England

        Years in the making

        by Series edited by Alexander Smith, Cathrine Degnen

        Seeking to explore what it means to grow older in contemporary Britain from the perspective of older people themselves, this richly detailed ethnographic study engages in debates over selfhood and people's relationships with time. Based on research conducted in a former coal mining village in South Yorkshire, England, Cathrine Degnen explores how the category of 'old age' comes to be assigned and experienced in everyday life through multiple registers of interaction, including that of social memory, in a postindustrial context of great social transformation. Degnen argues that the complex interplay of social, cultural and physical attributes of ageing means that older people can come to have a different position in relation to time and to the self than younger people, unseating normative conventions about narrative and temporality.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        April 2022

        Chinese religion in contemporary Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan

        The cult of the Two Grand Elders

        by Fabian Graham

        In Singapore and Malaysia, the inversion of Chinese Underworld traditions has meant that Underworld demons are now amongst the most commonly venerated deities in statue form, channelled through their spirit mediums, tang-ki. The Chinese Underworld and its sub-hells are populated by a bureaucracy drawn from the Buddhist, Taoist and vernacular pantheons. Under the watchful eye of Hell's 'enforcers', the lower echelons of demon soldiers impose post-mortal punishments on the souls of the recently deceased for moral transgressions committed during their prior incarnations. Chinese religion in contemporary Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan offers an ethnography of contemporary Chinese Underworld traditions, where night-time cemetery rituals assist the souls of the dead, exorcised spirits are imprisoned in Guinness bottles, and malicious foetus ghosts are enlisted to strengthen a temple's spirit army. Understanding the religious divergences between Singapore and Malaysia (and their counterparts in Taiwan) through an analysis of socio-political and historical events, Fabian Graham challenges common assumptions about the nature and scope of Chinese vernacular religious beliefs and practices. Graham's innovative approach to alterity allows the reader to listen to first-person dialogues between the author and channelled Underworld deities. Through its alternative methodological and narrative stance, the book intervenes in debates on the interrelation between sociocultural and spiritual worlds, and promotes the destigmatisation of spirit possession and discarnate phenomena in the future study of mystical and religious traditions.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2024

        How to be multiple

        The philosophy of twins

        by Helena de Bres, Julia de Bres

        In How to be multiple, Helena de Bres - a twin herself - argues that twinhood is a unique lens for examining our place in the world and how we relate to other people. The way we think about twins offers remarkable insights into some of the deepest questions of our existence, from what is a person? to how should we treat one another? Deftly weaving together literary and cultural history, philosophical enquiry and personal experience, de Bres examines such thorny issues as binary thinking, objectification, romantic love and friendship, revealing the limits of our individualistic perspectives. In this illuminating, entertaining book, wittily illustrated by her twin sister, de Bres ultimately suggests that to consider twinhood is to imagine the possibility of a more interconnected, capacious human future.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        November 2024

        US public diplomacy in socialist Yugoslavia, 1950–70

        Soft culture, cold partners

        by Carla Konta

        The first comprehensive account of the public and cultural diplomacy campaigns carried out by the US in Yugoslavia during the height of the Cold War, this book examines the political role of culture in US-Yugoslav bilateral relations and the fluid links between information and propaganda. Tito allowed the US Information Agency and the State Department's cultural programmes to enter Yugoslavia, liberated from Soviet control. The exchange of intellectual and political personnel helped foster the US-Yugoslav relationship, yet it posed severe ideological challenges for both sides. By providing new insights into porous borders between freedom and coercion in Tito's regime, this book shows how public diplomacy acted as an external input for Yugoslav liberalisation and dissident movements. Using extensive archival research and interviews, Konta analyses the links between information and propaganda, and the unintended effects of propaganda beyond the control of producers and receivers.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        August 2022

        Our real life in tombs

        by Angela Blumberg, Andrew Smith, Anna Barton

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        October 2021

        Religion and life cycles in early modern England

        by Caroline Bowden, Emily Vine, Tessa Whitehouse

        Religion and life cycles in early modern England assembles scholars working in the fields of history, English literature and art history to further our understanding of the intersection between religion and the life course in the period c. 1550-1800. Featuring chapters on Catholic, Protestant and Jewish communities, it encourages cross-confessional comparison between life stages and rites of passage that were of religious significance to all faiths in early modern England. The book considers biological processes such as birth and death, aspects of the social life cycle including schooling, coming of age and marriage and understandings of religious transition points such as spiritual awakenings and conversion. Through this inclusive and interdisciplinary approach, it seeks to show that the life cycle was not something fixed or predetermined and that early modern individuals experienced multiple, overlapping life cycles.

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        The Arts
        January 2019

        The secret life of romantic comedy

        by Celestino Deleyto

        The secret life of romantic comedy offers a new approach to one of the most popular and resilient genres in the history of Hollywood. Steering away from the rigidity and ideological determinism of traditional accounts of the genre, this book advocates a more flexible theory, which allows the student to explore the presence of the genre in unexpected places, extending the concept to encompass films that are not usually considered romantic comedies. Combining theory with detailed analyses of a selection of films, including To Be or Not to Be (1942), Rear Window (1954), Kiss Me Stupid (1964), Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) and Before Sunset (2004), the book aims to provide a practical framework for the exploration of a key area of contemporary experience - intimate matters - through one of its most powerful filmic representations: the genre of romantic comedy. Original and entertaining, The secret life of romantic comedy is perfect for students and academics of film and film genre.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2024

        The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia

        Engaging in everyday struggle

        by Alexandrina Vanke

        Despite the intense processes of deindustrialisation around the world, the working class continues to play an important role in post-industrial societies. However, working-class people are often stigmatised, morally judged and depicted negatively in dominant discourses. This book challenges stereotypical representations of workers, building on research into the everyday worlds of working-class and ordinary people in Russia's post-industrial cities. The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia is centred on the stories of local communities engaged in the everyday struggles that occur in deindustrialising settings under neoliberal neo-authoritarianism. The book suggests a novel approach to everyday life in post-industrial cities. Drawing on an ethnographic study with elements of arts-based research, the book presents a new genre of writing about workers influenced by the avant-garde documentary tradition and working-class literature.

      • Trusted Partner
        April 2021

        On the Purposes of Life and Whether They Exist

        A philosophical fitting

        by Axel Braig

        The musician, doctor and philosopher Axel Braig considers philosophy a little like the weather: he looks for the right clothes for every situation. Braig is primarily concerned with practical, effective things from the two-and-a-half millennia fund of (Western) thinking, such as helpful approaches in existential crises. In this book, he introduces us to philosophical thinkers from Plato to Montaigne to Levinas and Feyerabend. Braig not only shares his own philosophical biography, but above all encourages us to philosophise ourselves.

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        Humanities & Social Sciences
        April 2021

        Catholic nuns and sisters in a secular age

        Britain, 1945–90

        by Carmen M. Mangion

        This is the first in-depth study of post-war female religious life. It draws on archival materials and a remarkable set of eighty interviews to place Catholic sisters and nuns at the heart of the turbulent 1960s, integrating their story of social change into a larger British and international one. Shedding new light on how religious bodies engaged in modernisation, it addresses themes such as the Modern Girl and youth culture, '1968', generational discourse, post-war modernity, the voluntary sector and the women's movement. Women religious were at the forefront of the Roman Catholic Church's movement of adaptation and renewal towards the world. This volume tells their stories in their own words.

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