IRW Books

Public Catastrophes, Private Losses, edited by Sarah Tobias and Arlene Stein (Rutgers University Press 2025), demonstrates the debilitating harm of large-scale structural violence on communities, species, and ecosystems. The essays in this book reveal that it is impossible to fully understand—or challenge—the harms associated with public catastrophes without appreciating their personal dimension. During catastrophes, families and communities become repositories for loss, silence, mourning, witnessing, reconstruction, and reparation. Through a feminist lens, this book examines how public catastrophes imprint themselves on lives, how individuals, as members of groups, narrate, process, and grapple with legacies of loss, and how governments and nonprofits frequently exacerbate preexisting vulnerabilities.  

Feeling Democracy: Emotional Politics in the New Millennium, edited by Sarah Tobias and Arlene Stein (Rutgers University Press 2024), examines how both reactionary and progressive politics are driven largely by emotional appeals to the public. A work of interdisciplinary feminist scholarship, the book considers how emotional rhetoric in politics can be a double-edged sword—often wielded by authoritarian populists who seek to undermine democracy but sometimes helping to bring about a genuine renewal of participatory democracy.

The Perils of Populism, edited by Sarah Tobias and Arlene Stein (Rutgers University Press 2022), explores the growth of populism, authoritarianism, and nationalism in the United States, the Middle East, Europe, and India. The interdisciplinary essays provide distinctively feminist perspectives on the threat to democratic stability and contribute to a rapidly expanding literature on gender and the far right.

Trans Studies: The Challenge to Hetero/Homo Normativities, edited by Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Sarah Tobias (Rutgers University Press, 2016), provides insights about how academics and activists might transform scholarship and public policy on trans and gender non-conforming issues. The anthology grew out of the 2012-2013 IRW seminar and IRW’s 2013 conference, Trans Politics: Scholarship and Strategies for Social Change.

Winner of the 2017 Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from the Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS) at the City University of New York.

Gender and Culture at the Limits of Rights, edited by Dorothy L. Hodgson (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), explores the concept of "women's rights as human rights” and the way in which a rights-based analysis can promote or limit the attainment of gender justice. Most of the essays in the volume were originally presented as part of the 2008-9 IRW seminar and its accompanying spring colloquium.

No Permanent Waves: Recasting Histories of U.S. Feminism, edited by Nancy Hewitt (Rutgers University Press, 2010) showcases a group of papers that were first presented at an IRW colloquium. The contributors "address issues of race, class and sexuality within histories of women's rights and feminism as well as the cultural and intellectual currents and social and political priorities that marked movements for women's advancement and liberation. The concept of waves surging and receding cannot fully capture these multiple and overlapping movements, chronologies, issues, and sites."

The papers collected in The Sex of Class: Women Transforming American Labor, edited by Dorothy Sue Cobble (Cornell University Press, 2007), examines the role sex plays in the workforce, as well as contemporary and historical domestic and global labor movements.

The Journal of International Labor and Working-Class History issued a special edition on “Working-Class Subjectivities and Sexualities” in Spring 2006. Edited by Dorothy Sue Cobble and Victoria Hattam, several of the articles in this volume were first presented as papers at spring colloquium organized by the IRW and ILWCH in 2004.

Gendering Disability, edited by Bonnie G. Smith and Beth Hutchison (Rutgers University Press, 2004), collects work presented at a three-day IRW conference that brought together gender studies and disabilities studies scholars.

Feminist Locations: Local and Global, Theory and Practice edited by Marianne DeKoven (Rutgers University Press, 2001), is based on scholarship presented at the IRW from 1995 to 1998.  

Transitions, Environments, Translations: Feminisms in International Politics edited by Joan W. Scott, Cora Kaplan, and Debra Keates (Routledge, 1997), from work presented at a conference jointly presented by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton and the IRW.

With the Women's Rights Litigation Clinic at Rutgers Law School-Newark, the IRW co-sponsored The Project on Reproductive Rights Laws for the 1990s which culminated in the 1989 Rutgers University Press volume Reproductive Laws for the 1990s, co-edited by Sherrill Cohen and Nadine Taub.  

Describing the impetus for Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory and Writing By Black Women (Rutgers University Press, 1989), Board of Governors Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English Cheryl Wall writes, “I took the idea for a one-day conference to then-IRW director Carol Smith, who embraced it enthusiastically. The conference on October 22-23, 1987, was one of the most gratifying experiences of my career. The room for the symposium was filled with many of the most brilliant scholars and writers of my generation. The book became one of the foundational texts in black feminist criticism. I will forever be grateful for the support of the IRW.”

Women, Households, and the Economy, edited by Lourdes Beneria and Catharine R. Stimpson (Rutgers University Press, 1987), collects papers presented at a two-day conference stemming from a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation “to bring together a group of scholars on the cutting edge of the thinking about women and the economy.”