Books Division

University of Minnesota Press publishes a wide variety of trade, regional, and scholarly books in various subject areas. Browse our special theme, search books by series, explore our new releases, or check out our upcoming events, and subject catalogs.

Series lander

Learning tools and syllabus suggestions 

 

IMPERIALISM

  • From the front lines of the war on academic freedom, linking the policing of knowledge to the relationship between universities, militarism, and neoliberalism
  • Exposing the carceral webs and weaponized data that shape Chicago’s police wars
  • A deep dive into Italian cinema under Mussolini’s regime and the filmmakers who used it as a means of antifascist resistance
  • Reassessing the role of torture in the context of police violence, mass incarceration, and racial capitalism
  • How the U.S. empire-state transformed post-1945 Afghanistan into a key site for reimagining development

 

NONFICTION LITERATURE

  • The deep and personal story—told through history, poetry, and images—of the forced displacement of the Sámi people from their homeland in northern Norway and Sweden and its reverberations today
  • Tracing how the “Great Replacement” narrative has shaped far right extremism and propelled its dangerous political projects and acts of violence
  • A stunning lyrical commentary on the constructions of race, gender, and class in the fraught nexus of a Black woman’s personal experience and cultural history
  • A personal guide to the transformations, hard truths, profound pleasures, and infinite possibilities of aging
  • An in-depth, perceptive account of the unconventional life of the Moomins’ beloved creator, now available in the United States

 

ENVIRONMENTAL FICTION

  • Eclectic, experimental, and wildly imaginative climate fictions from a familiar world hauntingly transformed
  • Set loose a herd of bison in downtown Edmonton: what could go wrong?
  • The new novel from the author of As We Have Always Done, a poetic world-building journey into the power of Anishinaabe life and traditions amid colonialism
  • A wry novel set at the edge of the Earth about the courage it takes to band together, even as everything around you falls apart
  • A postapocalyptic noir that asks if love and political ideals can survive civilizational collapse

 

MUSIC

  • The conception, creation, recording, and significance of the Beatles’ “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever”
  • The emotional, epic story of James “Cornbread” Harris—a self-proclaimed “blessed dude” and one of Minneapolis’s most influential musicians
  • The story of the Minneapolis musicians unexpectedly summoned to re-record half of the songs on Bob Dylan's most acclaimed album
  • The raw material and interviews behind Anthony Scaduto’s iconic biography of Bob Dylan draw an intimate and multifaceted portrait of the singer-songwriter who defined his era
  • From the young Black teenager who built a bass guitar in woodshop to the musician building a solo career with Motown Records—Prince’s bassist BrownMark on growing up in Minneapolis, joining Prince and The Revolution, and his life in the purple kingdom

TRANS STUDIES

  • How the “bad feelings” of trans experience inform trans survival and flourishing
  • Locating the roots of toxic masculinity and finding its displacement in unruly culture
  • Establishing trans philosophy as a unique field of inquiry, offering tools for our quest toward a more just and equitable world
  • Uncovering the overlapping histories of blackness and trans identity from the nineteenth century to the present day
  • Examining trans- healthcare as a key site through which struggles for health and justice take shape

ENVIRONMENTAL NONFICTION

  • A personal journey of bringing together Western science and Indigenous ecology to transform our understanding of the human role in healing our planet
  • People live by their stories—how can we use them to accelerate action on climate change?
  • Reimagining adaptation amid climate change–driven mutations of urban space and life
  • A kaleidoscopic literary exploration of extinction and conservation, inspired by the latest scientific research
  • Travel through a garden’s seasons toward healing, reclamation, and wholeness—for us, and for our beloved relative, the Earth

 

MINNESOTA VOICES AND ACTIVISM

  • A young Black girl in Minneapolis grapples with the death of George Floyd
  • Uncovering the pernicious narratives white people create to justify white supremacy and sustain racist oppression
  • A brilliant and rich gathering of voices on the American experience of this past year and beyond, from Indigenous writers and writers of color from Minnesota
  • How a Black woman from Texas became one of the most well-known civil rights activists in Minnesota, detailing seven remarkable decades of fighting for fairness in voting, housing, education, and employment
  • A look at the historic Rondo neighborhood of Saint Paul through the eyes of thirty-three former residents—back in print

 

COOKBOOKS

  • A cultural icon of Lake Superior cuisine shares its story, recipes, and techniques
  • The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen
  • A fresh batch of deliciously distinctive recipes from the Star Tribune’s beloved annual cookie contest—with even more recipes, enticing photographs, and bakers’ stories
  • The Steger Homestead Kitchen
  • Delicious recipes and community spirit make Appetite For Change a force for good in North Minneapolis

 

DIGITAL CULTURE

  • An urgent reckoning with digital technology’s fundamentally right-wing legal and economic underpinnings
  • A feminist perspective on the early history of personal computing, revealing how computers were integrated into the most intimate aspects of family life
  • A resource for planning, reimagining, and participating in the digital transformation of graduate study in the humanities
  • Exploring technology, ethics, and culture to unlock digital scholarship’s potential
  • The first book to intervene in debates on computation in the digital humanities

INDIGENOUS VISIBILITY AND VOICES

  • Poem-songs summon the voices of Anishinaabe ancestors and sing to future generations
  • A respected elder shares stories and insights from growing up on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota
  • An extraordinary illustrated biography of a Métis man and Anishinaabe woman navigating great changes in their homeland along the U.S.–Canada border in the early twentieth century
  • What are the limits of political solidarity, and how can visual culture contribute to social change?
  • Who has the right to represent Native history?

 

PLANTS

  • Interdisciplinary essays on Manuela Infante’s award-winning play explore the relationship between critical plant studies and performance art in the Anthropocene
  • An exploration of the explosive illegal trade in succulents and the passion that drives it
  • A radical proposal for how a tiny organism can transform our understanding of human relations
  • The first complete resource for the practical use of plants in the Anishinaabe culture and the stories that surround them
  • Exploring the idea that plants can think, feel, and communicate as a way of reconfiguring our relationship with the natural world

 

MINNESOTA FIGURES

  • How two teenage girls in Minnesota jump-started a revolution in high school athletics
  • Travel with Olympic gold medalist Jessie Diggins on her compelling journey from America’s heartland to international sports history, navigating challenges and triumphs with rugged grit and a splash of glitter
  • The complex and dramatic history of an illegal teachers’ strike that forever altered labor relations and Minnesota politics
  • Forty-four years after two men married in a legal ceremony in Minnesota, the Supreme Court has decided the question first raised by these gay pioneers
  • The inspiring life story of Minnesota’s first woman lieutenant governor: breaking political ground, navigating patriarchal tradition, and persevering through great personal loss

 

UNIVOCAL SERIES

  • A postapocalyptic noir that asks if love and political ideals can survive civilizational collapse
  • A warrior struggles through an apocalyptic landscape and the world after death
  • Philosophically analyzing the work of one of the twentieth century’s most popular and peculiar science fiction authors
  • A walking journey through France’s vast interior becomes a meditation on both personal recovery and the role of history in the present—more than 425,000 copies sold in France
  • A profound exploration of the external influences that shape human consciousness, from healing rituals to digital devices

 

ABOLITION

  • How Black Atlantic literature can challenge conventions and redefine literary scholarship
  • A landmark sociological examination of terrorism prosecution in United States courts
  • A bold and provocative analysis of Jane Austen as an early gender abolitionist
  • Unmasks the horrors of a social order reproduced and maintained by the violence of police
  • A groundbreaking collection of writings by Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group documenting their efforts to expose France’s inhumane treatment of prisoners

 

BOOKS WITH TEACHABLE PODCAST EPISODES

  • Exploring one of the greatest potential contributors to climate change—thawing permafrost—and the anxiety of extinction on an increasingly hostile planet
  • A journey through unexplored spaces that foreground new ways of inhabiting the urban
  • A timely rethinking of the archetypal story of Noah, the great flood, and who was left behind as the waters rose
  • Explores ecological impasses and opportunities of our fossil-fueled civilization
  • Analyzing how 1980s visual culture provided a vital space for women artists to theorize and visualize their own bodies and sexualities

 

HISTORY

  • The long and pernicious relationship between fast food restaurants and the African American community
  • Redefining the artistic movement that helped shape American modernism
  • Examining architecture’s foundational role in the repression of democracy
  • How representations of the preparation, sale, and consumption of leftovers in nineteenth-century urban France link socioeconomic and aesthetic history
  • A critical look at the competing motivations behind one of modern architecture’s most widely known and misunderstood movements

 

MICHEL SERRES

  • For the first time in English, the introductory volume in a major French philosopher’s groundbreaking series of poetic transdisciplinary works
  • The foundational work in the area now known as posthuman thought
  • Renowned philosopher Michel Serres finds the origins of knowledge in the movement of the body
  • Presents a philosophy that merges the humanities with all creation
  • An engaging critique of the science and metaphysics behind our understanding of the universe

 

ANIME

  • Unlocking the technosocial implications of global geek cultures
  • How animation can reconnect us with bodily experiences
  • For students, fans, and scholars alike, this wide-ranging primer on anime employs a panoply of critical approaches
  • A formal approach to anime rethinks globalization and transnationality under neoliberalism
  • A major work destined to change how scholars and students look at television and animation

 

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

  • Applying insights from philosophy and cognitive science to address the urgent issue of smartphone-induced distracted driving
  • Examining the links between today’s ideas of radical life extension and age-old notions of immortality
  • A radical rethinking of the theory and the experience of mental images
  • A sweeping new ecological take on technology
  • The first philosophy of technology, constructing humans as technological and technology as an underpinning of all culture

 

MICROBES

  • Why the global health project to avert emerging microbes continually fails
  • Examining the racial underpinnings of food, microbial medicine, and disgust in America
  • A fascinating ethnography of microbes that opens up new spaces for anthropological inquiry
  • Assesses a promising new approach to restoring the health of our bodies and our planet
  • How computer animation technologies became vital visualization tools in the life sciences

 

EDUCATION

  • When inclusion into the fold of citizenship is conditioned by a social group’s conceit to ritual violence, humiliation, and exploitation, what can anti-citizenship offer us?
  • The unintended consequences of youth empowerment programs for Latino boys
  • Learning from children about citizenship status and how it shapes their school experience
  • Exploring the role of identitarian politics in the privatization of Newark’s public school system
  • Explores how university governance is restricted by ceremony and what it must do to survive

 

SHIPWRECKS

  • Shipwreck stories from along Minnesota’s north shore of Lake Superior and Isle Royale
  • A gripping tale of one of the worst shipwrecks in Great Lakes history and of remarkable survival against all odds
  • The first complete—and fully illustrated—account of the deadliest storm in Great Lakes history
  • A moving account of the legendary Great Lakes shipwreck
  • A documentary drawn from testimony at the Coast Guard’s official inquiry looks anew at one of the most storied, and mysterious, shipwrecks in American history

 

DIVERSE ECONOMIES AND LIVABLE WORLDS

  • The transformational possibilities of everyday hygiene and care practices
  • A groundbreaking feminist perspective on Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) rule in Bolivia and the country’s radical transformation under Evo Morales
  • Questioning the boundaries between politics and economics
  • A powerful new understanding of cooperation as an antidote to alienation and inequality
  • A unique more-than-capitalist take on urban dynamics

 

ART AND PUBLIC SPACE

  • A close-up history of the Yugoslav artists who broke down the boundaries between public and private
  • Interpreting the meaning of hospitality in an unwelcoming political moment
  • How participatory art enabled collaboration between institutions and politicized artists in 1980s New York
  • Modeling a disability culture perspective on performance practice toward socially just futures
  • An expansive and revelatory study of Robert Smithson’s life and the hidden influences on his iconic creations

 

FILM STUDIES

  • Exploring how Indigenous media has flourished across Canada from the 1990s to the present
  • A cultural history of the enduring relationship between film spectatorship and intoxicating substances
  • An exploration of the fundamental bond between cinema and the cosmos
  • Connecting interactive cinema to media ethics and global citizenship
  • Formative writings by French avant-garde filmmaker Chris Marker

 

OIL

  • How social media has become a critical tool for advancing the interests of the Canadian oil industry
  • Examines how settler colonial and sexist infrastructures and narratives order a resource boom
  • A collective engages and mirrors the critical need for energy justice and transformation
  • A vital contribution to environmental humanities that explores artistic responses to the plastic age
  • How contemporary environmental struggles and resistance to pipeline development became populist struggles

 

SOCIAL JUSTICE

  • Uncovering the pernicious narratives white people create to justify white supremacy and sustain racist oppression
  • This vital addition to carceral, prison, and disability studies draws important new links between deinstitutionalization and decarceration
  • Considers colonial school–prison systems in relation to the self-determination of Native communities, nations, and peoples
  • A brilliant and rich gathering of voices on the American experience of this past year and beyond, from Indigenous writers and writers of color from Minnesota
  • Examines how radical bookstores and similar spaces serve as launching pads for social movements

 

DEEP TIME

  • Advancing a phenomenological approach to deep time
  • Humanists, scientists, and artists collaborate to address the disjunctive temporalities of ecological crisis
  • How poetry can help us think about and live in the Anthropocene by reframing our intimate relationship with geological time
  • A bold new consideration of climate change between narratives of the Earth’s layers and policy of the present
  • A breathtaking tour through thousands of years of urban life and its attendant technologies, rewriting the history of our cities

 

FORGOTTEN FOUNDATIONS

  • The first English translation of letters of arrest from eighteenth century France held in the archives of the Bastille
  • How the queer correspondence art of Ray Johnson disrupted art world conventions and anticipated today’s highly networked culture
  • From the telegraph to the touchscreen, how the development of binary switching transformed everyday life and changed the shape of human agency
  • The history of how a deceptively ordinary piece of office furniture transformed our relationship with information
  • An eye-opening look at why a “good night’s sleep” might be anything but

 

DEATH AND GRIEF

  • After Effects
  • Our Grateful Dead
  • What God Is Honored Here?
  • Jack and the Ghost
  • We Know How This Ends

 

FORERUNNERS

  • How Pee-wee and his playhouse help us reimagine our relationships to technology
  • How the construction of Muslim boys as proto-terrorists is integral to the story of American racial capitalism
  • Who will lead the transition from fossil fuel–dependent societies into renewable energy futures?
  • Reveals the alt-right’s project to claim science fiction and—by extension—the future
  • A bold and provocative analysis of Jane Austen as an early gender abolitionist