Roy Foster | On Seamus Heaney September 10, 2020 The most important Irish poet of the postwar era, Seamus Heaney rose to prominence as his native Northern Ireland descended into sectarian violence. Read More
Leslie Geddes on Watermarks September 02, 2020 Formless, mutable, transparent: the element of water posed major challenges for the visual artists of the Renaissance. To the engineers of the era, water represented a force that could be harnessed for human industry but was equally possessed of formidable destructive power. Read More
Despina Stratigakos on Hitler’s Northern Utopia August 31, 2020 Between 1940 and 1945, German occupiers transformed Norway into a vast construction zone. This remarkable building campaign, largely unknown today, was designed to extend the Greater German Reich beyond the Arctic Circle and turn the Scandinavian country into a racial utopia. Read More
Navigating grad school in uncertain times August 26, 2020 Even in “normal” times, grad school is fraught with uncertainty – uncertainty around whether a degree is worth it, whether you picked the right program and whether they were smart to pick you, whether you can get enough funding to keep doing your work, whether you can publish enough to get a job, and whether there even will be any jobs when you’re done. Read More
Multitasking and the pandemic parent August 24, 2020 From my third floor attic office, I can hear my wife’s muffled voice through the door to the room just off the stairs. I can’t hear what she is saying, but from its now familiar cadence, I can tell that she is in a meeting. We used to post signs when we were in meetings, but we don’t bother anymore. Read More
By Design | Porcelain: A History from the Heart of Europe August 24, 2020 Porcelain, once dubbed “white gold” after being reproduced by an eighteenth-century Saxon alchemist, may seem to us today like a quaint rarity, a beautiful relic confined to elegant china cabinets. But in Suzanne Marchand’s absorbing history, this translucent ceramic comes to life as a once-ubiquitous commodity linked to geopolitical upheaval and the global transformations of the last three centuries. Read More
Skills for Scholars: The new tools of the trade August 18, 2020 Any discussion of scholarly tools at Princeton University Press naturally begins with a reverent nod to the printing press—for obvious reasons but also in subtler ways. Since 1911, the Press’s headquarters have been housed in a timeless Collegiate Gothic building (later named for benefactor Charles Scribner), designed by Ernest Flagg and sitting at the edge of Princeton’s campus. Read More
Wenfei Tong on Bird Love August 11, 2020 Bonds of affection can take as many forms for birds as they do for humans, and common evolutionary themes explain many ways birds, like humans, experience and demonstrate “love.” Read More
Robert Inman and Daniel Rubinfeld on Democratic Federalism August 06, 2020 Around the world, federalism has emerged as the system of choice for nascent republics and established nations alike. In this book, leading scholars and governmental advisers Robert Inman and Daniel Rubinfeld consider the most promising forms of federal governance and the most effective path to enacting federal policies. Read More
Reconsidering ethical costs in a pandemic August 03, 2020 As the reality of the pandemic set in, faculty, students, and administrators scrambled to adjust to the sudden switch to online teaching. I learned to navigate Zoom with a toddler at home and my students packed up their dorms and prepared to finish their coursework elsewhere. Read More
What is Jewish hope? July 31, 2020 How, in a global pandemic, can we look forward to the future with hope? The economic and political landscape that COVID-19 will leave in its wake is alarmingly uncertain. Read More
A paean to the paperback July 30, 2020 My passion for paperbacks began back in the year 2000 with my first job in book publishing. Prior to that, as a philosophy graduate student, I was enamored of finding hardback editions, ideally jacketed, of the philosophers whose works I was reading. Read More
Forgiveness works: What can we learn from a victim‑centered justice system July 27, 2020 As many of us march in the streets or watch televised protests, we are forced to acknowledge the brutalities of our punitive justice system all across the United States. Read More
A look inside Just Giving July 24, 2020 “Your fortune is rolling up, rolling up like an avalanche! You must keep up with it! You must distribute it faster than it grows! If you do not, it will crush you, and your children, and your children’s children!” So wrote Frederick Gates to sixty-seven-year-old John D. Rockefeller in 1906. Read More
By Design | Karen Siatras on designing for Humboldt July 20, 2020 Karen Siatras is a graphic designer in SAAM’s Publications office. For her most recent project, the massive exhibition catalogue that accompanies Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture, she created special decorative letters at the start of each chapter in the book. Read More