The New School’s Year in Books 2017–18
From the history of fascism and populism to the perversion of America’s self-made man to the ways in which “anxieties of affluence” suppress discussions of income inequality, faculty members confronted a number of pressing social issues this year in more than 30 books released over the past academic year.
Their books ranges from full-length poetry collections to books for young adult readers to anthologies and critical studies. New School alumni authors were prolific as well.
The following is a list of books by faculty members released over the 2017–18 academic year. It will continue to be updated as more titles are submitted for inclusion.
Todd Ayoung, Parsons faculty; Liz Slagus, Parsons faculty; Norene Leddy, Associate Director of Faculty Affairs at Open Campus (Contributors)/ Art as Social Action: An Introduction to the Principles and Practices of Teaching Social Practice Art (Allworth Press)
“Art as Social Action . . . is an essential guide to deepening social art practices and teaching them to students.” ―Laura Raicovich, president and executive director, Queens Museum
Jonathan Bach, Associate Professor of Global Studies / What Remains: Everyday Encounters with the Socialist Past in Germany (Columbia University Press)
What happens when an entire modern state’s material culture becomes abruptly obsolete? How do ordinary people encounter what remains? In this ethnography, Jonathan Bach examines the afterlife of East Germany following the fall of the Berlin Wall, as things and places from that vanished socialist past continue to circulate and shape the politics of memory.
Alexandra Delano Alonso, Associate Professor and Chair of Global Studies / From Here and There (Oxford University Press)
This book looks at citizenship and immigrant integration from the perspective of countries of origin: specifically the processes through which Mexico and other Latin American countries are establishing programs to give their emigrant populations better access to education, health, banking, labor rights, language acquisition and civic participation in the United States.
Juliette Cezzar, Assistant Professor of Communication Design/ The AIGA Guide to Careers in Graphic and Communication Design (Bloomsbury Academic)
Through clear prose, a broad survey of contexts where designers find themselves in the present day, and interviews with designers, The AIGA Guide to Careers in Graphic and Communication Design is an invaluable resource for finding your place in this quickly changing and growing field.
Simon Critchley, Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy / What We Think About When We Think About Soccer (Penguin Random House)
You play soccer. You watch soccer. You live soccer You breathe soccer. But do you think about soccer?
Philip Dray, faculty in Journalism + Design / The Fair Chase: The Epic Story of Hunting in America (Basic Books)
This sweeping and balanced book offers a definitive account of hunting in America. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the evolution of our nation’s foundational myths.
Federico Finchelstein, Professor of History / From Fascism to Populism in History (University of California Press)
What is fascism and what is populism? What are their connections in history and theory, and how should we address their significant differences? What does it mean when pundits call Donald Trump a fascist, or label as populist politicians who span left and right such as Hugo Chávez, Juan Perón, Rodrigo Duterte, and Marine Le Pen? Federico Finchelstein, one of the leading scholars of fascist and populist ideologies, synthesizes their history in order to answer these questions and offer a thoughtful perspective on how we might apply the concepts today.
Jennifer Firestone, Assistant Professor of Literary Studies / Gates and Fields (Belladonna)
Poetry. Women’s Studies. In dialogue with Emily Dickinson and other voices from the past, GATES & FIELDS maps a poetics of meditation and disjuncture, where loss is inconceivable and language, faith, and the rituals of grief fall short. GATES & FIELDS demands an attention to the dead, the dying, and those left behind.
Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, Professor of International Affairs / Millennium Development Goals: Ideas, Interests and Influence (Routledge)
Heralded as a success that mobilized support for development, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) ushered in an era of setting development agendas by setting global goals. This book critically evaluates the MDG experience from the capabilities and human rights perspectives, and questions the use of quantitative targets as an instrument of global governance.
Diana Goetsch, Grace Paley Teaching Fellow / In America (Rattle)
Diana Goetsch’s eighth collection of poems, her first since coming out as a trans woman, introduces us to another country, where an airport, a Starbucks, a family dinner are as confounding as the riddle of the Sphinx. Maybe the answers to how to navigate America are in plain sight, spelled out in a pop song or on a milk carton. Maybe we’re destined to be tumbleweed, “drifting from nowhere to nowhere” in no man’s land. Through it all, Goetsch remains who she’s always been — essentially a love poet, patrolling the shadowlands for what can be redeemed.
Peter Hoffman, Studley Faculty Fellow, and Thomas G. Weiss / Humanitarianism, War, and Politics: Solferino to Syria and Beyond (Rowman & Littlefield)
What is humanitarianism? This authoritative book provides a comprehensive analysis of the original idea and its evolution, exploring its triangulation with war and politics. Peter J. Hoffman and Thomas G. Weiss trace the origins of humanitarianism, its social movement, and the institutions (international humanitarian law) and organizations (providers of assistance and protection) that comprise it.
Ann Hood, faculty member in Schools of Public Engagement / Morningstar: Growing Up With Books (Norton, W.W. & Company, Inc.)
A memoir about the magic and inspiration of books from a beloved and best-selling author.
Jennifer Kabat, faculty in the Arts (Contributor) / Best American Essays, 2018 (Mariner Books)
Ben Katchor, Associate Professor of Illustration (Editor) / The Best American Comics 2017 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
“Editors Ben Katchor and Bill Kartalopoulos are this year’s team for The Best American Comics 2017, which pulls together a smorgasbord of great talent in an anthology format and provides a superb starting point for adult readers to experience the breadth and depth of what graphic novels can offer.” — Library Journal
Paul A. Kottman, Associate Professor of Literary Studies / Love As Human Freedom (Sanford University Press)
Rather than see love as a natural form of affection, Love As Human Freedom sees love as a practice that changes over time through which new social realities are brought into being.
Caspar Lam, Assistant Professor of Communication Design, and YuJune Park, Assistant Professor of Communication Design / Ming Romantic: Collected and Bound (Synoptic Office)
How does one begin creating a Chinese typeface? In Ming Romantic: Collected and Bound, design studio Synoptic Office explores this question through a selection of writings, interviews, and historical material collected during the creation of Ming Romantic, a didone-inspired, Chinese typeface.
Lana Lin, Director of Undergraduate Media Studies / Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects (Fordham University Press)
What does it mean to live with life-threatening illness? How does one respond to loss? Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects attempts to answer these questions and, as such, illuminates the vulnerabilities of the human body and how human beings suffer harm. In particular, it examines how cancer disrupts feelings of bodily integrity and agency.
Mark Lipton, Professor Of Management / Mean Men: The perversion of America’s Self-Made Man (The Voussoir Press)
Drawing on author Mark Lipton’s extensive experience as adviser to major corporations, start-ups, government agencies, and not-for-profits, Mean Men synthesizes decades of psychological research to expose what really drives this subset of America’s leaders.
Charlene Lau, Post-Doctoral Fellow in Material and Visual Culture (Contributor) / Visual Typologies from the Early Modern to the Contemporary: Local Contexts and Global Practices (Routledge)
Visual Typologies from the Early Modern to the Contemporary investigates the pictorial representation of types from the sixteenth to the twenty- first century.
Ulrich Lehmann, Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts / Fashion and Materialism (Edinburgh University Press)
A cultural and historical philosophy of fashion in economic and social life from the 1830s to the present day
Natasha Lennard, Part-Time Faculty Member / Violence: Humans in Dark Times (Editor) (City Lights Open Media)
Through a series of penetrating conversations originally published in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books, Brad Evans and Natasha Lennard talk with a wide range of cutting edge thinkers — including Oliver Stone, Simon Critchley, and Elaine Scarry — to explore the problem of violence in everyday life, politics, culture, media, language, memory, and the environment.
Shannon Mattern, Associate Professor of Media Studies / Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media (University of Minnesota Press).
In Code and Clay, Data and Dirt Shannon Mattern advances the provocative argument that our urban spaces have been “smart” and mediated for thousands of years.
Patrick McGrath, faculty member in Schools of Public Engagement / The Wardrobe Mistress (Hutchinson)
‘McGrath is that rare yet essential thing, a writer who can expose our darkest fears without making us run away from them.’ New Statesman
Timon McPhearson, Associate Professor of Urban Ecology / Urban Planet Knowledge Towards Sustainable Cities (Cambridge University Press)
Global urbanization promises better services, stronger economies, and more connections; it also carries risks and unforeseeable consequences. To deepen our understanding of this complex process and its importance for global sustainability, we need to build interdisciplinary knowledge around a systems approach. Urban Planet takes an integrative look at our urban environment, bringing together scholars from a diverse range of disciplines: from sociology and political science to evolutionary biology, geography, economics and engineering.
Carolin Mees, Parsons faculty / Participatory Design and Self-building in Shared Urban Open Spaces Community Gardens and Casitas in New York City (Springer, Urban Agriculture Book Series)
The book investigates the development of community gardens with self-built structures, which have existed as a shared public open space land use form in New York City’s low-come neighborhoods like the South Bronx since the 1970s.
James Miller, Professor of Liberal Studies and Special Advisor to Provost / Lives of the Eminent Philosophers (Editor) (Oxford University Press)
A capacious, fascinating, and charming compendium of ancient inspiration
and instruction.
Julia Ott, Associate Professor of History / American Capitalism New Histories (Book Chapter) (Columbia University Press)
American Capitalism presents a sampling of cutting-edge research from prominent scholars. These broad-minded and rigorous essays venture new angles on finance, debt, and credit; women’s rights; slavery and political economy; the racialization of capitalism; labor beyond industrial wage workers; and the production of knowledge, including the idea of the economy, among other topics.
Dominic Pettman, Professor of Culture and Media / How Desire Makes Us More and Less Than Human (University of Minnesota Press)
To our modern ears the word “creature” has wild, musky, even monstrous, connotations. And yet the terms “creaturely” and “love,” taken together, have traditionally been associated with theological debates around the enigmatic affection between God and His key creation, Man. In Creaturely Love, Dominic Pettman explores the ways in which desire makes us both more, and less, human.
Claire Potter, Professor of History and Executive Editor of Public Seminar (Editor) / Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’s Past (Rutgers University Press)
America has gone Hamilton crazy. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony-winning musical has spawned sold-out performances, a triple platinum cast album, and a score so catchy that it is being used to teach U.S. history in classrooms across the country. But just how historically accurate is Hamilton? And how is the show itself making history?
Melissa Rachleff, Parsons faculty / Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952–1965 (Prestel)
This enlightening and thought-provoking look at New York City’s postwar art scene focuses on the galleries and the artists that helped transform American art.
David Shapiro, Professor Emeritus of Psychology / A Psychodynamic View of Action and Responsibility: Clinical Studies in Subjective Experience (Routledge)
A Psychodynamic View of Action and Responsibility explores the individual’s experience of ownership or responsibility for what he or she does, says, and even believes, and their avoidance of that experience.
Rachel Sherman, Associate Professor of Sociology / Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence (Princeton University Press)
A surprising and revealing look at how today’s elite view their own wealth and place in society.
Rebecca Stenn, faculty in Dance / A Life in Dance: A Practical Guide (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform)
With A Life in Dance,Stenn and Kirmser give you resources to help you book a rehearsal space, find auditions, apply for grants, pay off student loans and more.
Eugene Thacker, Professor of Media Studies / Infinite Resignation (Penguin Random House)
By turns melancholic, misanthropic, and darkly funny, (“Birth is a metaphysical injury — healing takes time — the span of one’s life”), many will find Infinite Resignation a welcome antidote to the exuberant imbecility of our times.
McKenzie Wark, Professor of Culture and Media / Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty First Century (Verso Books)
A guide to the thinkers and the ideas that will shape the future.
Terry Williams, Professor of Sociology (Co-author) / On Ethnography (Wiley)
Covering both the theoretical foundations and practical realities of ethnography, this highly readable and entertaining book will be invaluable to students in sociology and other disciplines in which ethnography has become a core qualitative research method.
Val Vinokur, Associate Professor of Literary Studies / The Essential Fictions of Isaac Babel: New Translations by Val Vinokur (Northwestern University Press)
On the centenary of the revolution that toppled the Romanov tsars, Babel’s fictions continue to absorb and fascinate contemporary readers interested in eastern European and Jewish literature as well as the history and politics of the twentieth century.
Robin Wagner-Pacifici, University in Exile Professor of Sociology / What is an Event? (University of Chicago Press)
Inspired by the cataclysmic events of September 11, Robin Wagner-Pacifici presents here a tour de force, an analysis of how events erupt and take off from the ground of ongoing, everyday life, and how they then move across time and landscape.
Thomas Werner, Assistant Professor of Photography / The Fashion Image: Planning and Producing Fashion Photographs and Films (Bloomsbury Visual Arts)
With an extensive list of international resources, including Instagram accounts and several assignments, this book is an essential guide for fashion photographers and film makers.
Samantha Zighelboim, Parsons faculty / The Fat Sonnets (Argos Books)
Poetry. Women’s Studies. Samantha Zighelboim’s debut collection conducts a radical re-examination of what we mean by body. In these poems, body is noun, verb and adverb; body is dearly beloved and fiercely rejected; it is by turns a singularly beautiful process and a frightening object.
