Cornell University Press imprint: 972 books

Although diplomats negotiate more and more aspects of world affairs—from trade and security issues to health, human rights, and the environment—we have little idea of, and even less control over, what they are doing in our name. In Independent Diplomat, Carne Ross provides a compelling account...

To understand a city fully, writes Di Wang, we must observe its most basic units of social life. In The Teahouse under Socialism, Wang does just that, arguing that the teahouses of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, are some of the most important public spaces—perfect sites for examining...

Everyday life in China is increasingly shaped by a novel mix of neoliberal and socialist elements, of individual choices and state objectives. This combination of self-determination and socialism from afar has incited profound changes in the ways individuals think and act in different spheres of society. Covering...

The European Union is the world’s most advanced international organization, presiding over a level of legal and economic integration unmatched in global politics. To explain this achievement, many observers point to its formal rules that entail strong obligations and delegate substantial power to...

In the decade before the Civil War, Northern Democrats, although they ostensibly represented antislavery and free-state constituencies, made possible the passage of such proslavery legislation as the Compromise of 1850 and Fugitive Slave Law of the same year, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, and the...

Since the early 1990s hundreds of thousands of Tamil villagers in southern India have participated in literacy lessons, science demonstrations, and other events designed to transform them into active citizens with access to state power. These efforts to spread enlightenment among the oppressed are...

China's spectacular economic growth over the past two decades has dramatically depleted the country's natural resources and produced skyrocketing rates of pollution. Environmental degradation in China has also contributed to significant public health problems, mass migration, economic loss, and social...

Barbara Spackman here examines the ways in which decadent writers adopted the language of physiological illness and alteration as a figure for psychic otherness. By means of an ideological and rhetorical analysis of scientific as well as literary texts, she shows how the rhetoric of sickness provided...

In summer and fall 1941, as German armies advanced with shocking speed across the Soviet Union, the Soviet leadership embarked on a desperate attempt to safeguard the country's industrial and human resources. Their success helped determine the outcome of the war in Europe. To the Tashkent Station...

On March 11, 2011, Japan was struck by the shockwaves of a 9.0 magnitude undersea earthquake originating less than 50 miles off its eastern coastline. The most powerful earthquake to have hit Japan in recorded history, it produced a devastating tsunami with waves reaching heights of over 130 feet...

Since 1898, the United States and the United Nations have deployed military force more than three dozen times in attempts to rebuild failed states. Currently there are more state-building campaigns in progress than at any time in the past century—including Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, the Democratic...

Some contemporary approaches to literature still accept the separation of historical, biographical, external concerns from formal, internal ones. On the borderline that lends this division between inside and outside its apparent coherence is signature. In Peggy Kamuf’s view, studying signature will...

Examining and historicizing the concept of "otherness" in both literature and criticism, Lisa Lowe explores representations of non-European cultures in British and French writings from the eighteenth through the twentieth century. Lowe traces the intersections of culture, class, and sexuality in Lady...

Public academic prize contests—the concours académique—played a significant role in the intellectual life of Enlightenment France, with aspirants formulating positions on such matters as slavery, poverty, the education of women, tax reform, and urban renewal and submitting the resulting essays...