Areas of Scholarly Focus
SUNY Press has renewed its commitment to publishing in a number of diverse academic areas. The Press’s current areas of focus include:
African American Studies
Archaeology
Asian Studies
Environmental Studies
Indigenous Studies
Italian American Studies
Jewish Studies
New York/Regional
Philosophy
Political Science
Queer Studies
Religious Studies
Transpersonal Psychology
Women’s and Gender Studies
AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES is an interdisciplinary area that focuses on the history, culture, and politics of African Americans. The field includes scholars from disciplines as diverse as literature, political science, sociology, history, film, philosophy, the arts, religion, law, and public policy. Subjects and topics of interest include diasporic issues, civil rights, black churches, music, urban issues, African American families, blackness, racialization, film, literature, visual culture, black power movement, incarceration and prisons, slavery and its legacies, citizenship and nationalism, black youth, segregation, Afrocentrism, and Pan Africanism.
The SUNY Press list in African American studies has had a strong social science foundation and is poised to become more broadly interdisciplinary and a leader particularly in less traditional areas of African American studies such as black feminist studies or African American women’s and gender studies.
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List of our titles in African American studies
ARCHAEOLOGY is the study of material remains in order to speak about and give life to the peoples of the past: their cultures, histories, struggles, and accomplishments. The distribution of artifacts, the intentional and unintentional arrangement of sites, the pattern of settlements across a landscape—all are stepping stones to better understanding and appreciating the peoples who came before.
Archaeology is another area of growth at SUNY Press. We are committed to publishing and distributing distinguished, notable studies in the archaeologies of two regions—the northeastern United States and of prehistoric and classical Europe.
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List of our titles in Archaeology
ASIAN STUDIES is an interdisciplinary subject area covering humanities and social sciences related to Asia. SUNY Press is a leading press in the field and is particularly well known for books on Asian philosophy and religion. SUNY Press has published a number of works on Chinese philosophy, religion, literature, and culture, Indian religions, Buddhism, and comparative East-West philosophy. Additional areas of strength include work on Japan and Korea. While much of SUNY Press’s Asian studies list highlights humanities scholarship, important work in the social sciences, particularly on contemporary Japan, is a hallmark of the list as well.
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List of our titles in Asian studies
ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES is a broad interdisciplinary field that systematically studies human interaction with the environment, including the natural environment, built environments, and the sets of relationships between them. While distinct from ecology and environmental science, the discipline draws on the basic principles of those two fields of study as well as those of public policy, politics, law, economics, sociology, planning, pollution control, natural resources, and the interactions of human beings and nature.
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List of our titles in Environmental Studies
INDIGENOUS STUDIES illuminates the histories, cultures, and lives of communities and individuals who were, or are biologically or culturally connected to, the first human beings known to have lived in a geographically or politically defined area. Such “Indigenous” or “Native” communities have invariably been subject to military, economic, religious, political, and cultural domination by an outside power. Indigenous examples include the many First Nations communities in Canada, the Maori of New Zealand, and Native communities across all of the fifty United States.
SUNY Press has identified Indigenous studies as a key area for growth. The Indigenous studies list at SUNY Press will engage with and draw upon a range of scholarly disciplines—history, anthropology, ethnohistory, literary criticism, political science, economics, cultural criticism—to illuminate the range and complexity of the experiences of indigenous peoples in the past, present, and into the future.
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List of our titles in Indigenous studies
ITALIAN AMERICAN STUDIES examines the experiences of persons of Italian descent in North and South America, paying particular attention to the United States, and explores the ways in which both cultures combine to form a distinct ethnic culture. In addition to scholarly studies in literature, film, sociology, anthropology, and history, we are interested in books for more general readers that can help extend the understanding of this important ethnic group and its role in the history and culture of the United States.
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List of our titles in Italian American studies
JEWISH STUDIES is an interdisciplinary field that covers the whole of Jewish culture, history, religion, and literature, from the biblical to the contemporary. Long one of the leading publishers in this area, with an extensive backlist, SUNY Press continues to publish both scholarly and general books in the areas of Jewish literature, religion, and culture, with an emphasis on the contemporary American Jewish experience.
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List of our titles in Jewish studies
NEW YORK/REGIONAL is devoted to the study and celebration of all things New York. Through its Excelsior Editions imprint, SUNY Press publishes general and scholarly books of history, geography, natural history, photography, architecture, cooking, wine, and travel/recreation, as well as works of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Our aim is to showcase the diversity and abiding energy of the peoples, histories, and natural beauty of New York State.
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List of our titles in New York studies
PHILOSOPHY means “love of wisdom.” It is that branch of the academy which studies the ultimate questions: Who are we? Why are we here? What does it all mean? How can we know things? SUNY Press publishes primarily in the history of philosophy and continental philosophy. The history of philosophy is just that: study of major and minor philosophers throughout history. Continental philosophy is that branch of study that takes as its starting point certain European thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries.
SUNY Press is one of the leading presses in the field, and continues to acquire works of great interest and importance. Philosophical pluralism is on the rise, and continentalists have made significant inroads in the academy over the past 20 years. This sort of philosophy is the future, and SUNY Press is uniquely positioned to take advantage of that, in large part due to the Press’s decades-long support of this work.
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List of our titles in Philosophy
POLITICAL SCIENCE is the study of governments, public policies, systems, and political behavior. Political science subfields include political theory, political philosophy, political ideology, political economy, policy studies and analysis, comparative politics, international relations, and related fields such as public administration. Political scientists use both humanistic and scientific perspectives and tools and a variety of methodological approaches to examine the process, systems, and political dynamics of all countries and regions of the world.
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List of our titles in Political Science
QUEER STUDIES grew out of women’s and gender studies and gay and lesbian activism, and has become increasingly institutionalized in the U.S. academy since the late 1980s and early 1990s. While the term “queer” can be controversial in nonacademic contexts, “queer studies” is widely accepted within the academy to describe the study of the lives, cultures, and sexualities of those who identify as nonheterosexual. It also encourages a broader focus on identity, politics, culture, and the intersections of sexuality with other parts of identity (such as race, gender, and class), rather than a narrow focus on sexual practices that the term “sexuality studies” can seem to imply.
SUNY Press has published books in gay and lesbian studies and queer studies for most of the history of the field (since the early 1990s). New directions for the Press may include a series focusing on queer lives that features very readable narratives of the complexities of queer experience, increasing the offerings in queer theory, and focusing on work in queer studies that engages the concept of intersectionality—the relationships between and among various dimensions of identity.
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List of our titles in Queer studies
RELIGIOUS STUDIES is a diverse field. Religious studies scholars can study the philosophy and theology of a tradition, its sacred texts, and the ways people actually practice the religion today. SUNY Press has a very broad list in religious studies. Perhaps best known for the list on Asian studies, SUNY Press has also had a longstanding list on Islam as well as lists on Jewish religion and Christianity. SUNY Press is also recognized for books on women and religion and the environment and religion.
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List of our titles in Religious studies
TRANSPERSONAL PSYCHOLOGY grew out of humanistic psychology in the 1960s. Basically, it is spiritual psychology. It is often grouped with the human potential movement and/or the New Age, although erroneously, as well as more correctly with consciousness studies and integral studies.
SUNY Press is the leading press in the field and is uniquely positioned, in that it has single-handedly built its reputation within the academy. The Press was the first university press to publish authors in this field. Our premier series is the SUNY series in Transpersonal and Humanistic Psychology, where all the top people in the field—including one of its founding thinkers, Stanislav Grof—have published.
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List of our titles in Transpersonal Psychology
WOMEN’S AND GENDER STUDIES is an interdisciplinary academic field concerned with the study of women’s lives, feminism, and gender constructions. Women’s studies entered the academy as a result of student and faculty activism and was modeled on the ethnic studies programs, particularly Afro-American studies, that immediately preceded it. The activism that compelled universities to begin including women’s studies in their curricula was largely informed by the second wave feminist movement, which focused on the liberation of all women from patriarchal oppression. In the decades following its inception in the academy, women’s studies became increasingly concerned with the experiences of women of color and nonheterosexual women, and in the 1990s, scholars in the field started undertaking feminist examinations of masculinity as well. These additional concerns broadened the field, so that a significant number of former women’s studies departments became gender studies departments or women’s and gender studies departments.
SUNY Press has a long history of publishing in this field. The Press has a number of series that offer feminist perspectives in many of our historically important disciplinary areas of acquisitions, including philosophy, religion, and literary criticism. SUNY Press plans to bolster its position by staying abreast of the latest currents and concerns at the heart of the broader interdisciplinary field of women’s and gender studies, and by sponsoring innovative interdisciplinary work that is relevant to a number of disciplinary locations.
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List of our titles in Women’s and Gender studies
