Please consult the New School Course Catalog for a full course list. Fall 2022 courses include:
CREATIVE PUBLISHING & CRITICAL JOURNALISM, GPUB 5001
Jon Baskin, Instructor and Associate Director, Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism, and Natasha Lennard, Part-Time Faculty
An introduction to the master’s program in Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism, this course helps students develop their skills as writers, readers, and editors and orients them with regard to some of the major problems and publications of 20th-century cultural journalism. The core of the class is a workshop on long-form journalism, with each student expected to pitch, write, and edit a draft of 2,000 to 4,000 words on a topic of their choice. Students develop their essay in consultation with the professors and classmates, ensuring that it features the structure, voice, reporting technique, and methods of argument that are appropriate for longer-form journalistic commentary. To aid in our discussions of the structure and purpose of long-form writing, we read and analyze several examples of contemporary cultural reporting and criticism, including works by Vivian Gornick, Zadie Smith, John Hersey, Jelani Cobb, and Kaadzi Ghansah. We are also visited by working journalists who write or edit for publications like the New York Times, the New Yorker, Teen Vogue, and Texas Monthly.
DESIGN & THE FUTURE OF PUBLISHING: DESIGN & PROCESS—THE PRACTICE OF PUBLISHING, GPUB 5002
Juliette Cezzar, Associate Professor of Communication Design
This course is designed to serve as a broad foundation for students from non-design backgrounds, enabling them to give form to content. It is a hands-on studio course that begins with projects investigating typography, book and pamphlet design, digital printing, content on the Web, and ideation. Contemporary issues that cross design and publishing are discussed through a series of readings and analysis of contemporary books, magazines, and periodicals on both printed and digital platforms. The course is limited to CPCJ students in the fall. In the spring, half of the class consists of Parsons undergraduate design students, and students work in multidisciplinary teams creating conceptual publishing projects that combine design and publishing through an analysis of contemporary books, magazines, and periodicals on both printed and digital platforms.
CULTURAL CRITICISM, GPUB 5112
Melissa Monroe, Part-Time Assistant Professor
This course focuses on the elements that constitute a strong writing style and on the way writers concerned with political and cultural issues use various structural and rhetorical techniques to entertain and outrage, provoke and inspire. We look closely at texts by a variety of cultural critics, including Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Barbara Ehrenreich, Cathy Park Hong, Joseph Mitchell, George Orwell, Zadie Smith, Susan Sontag, and Virginia Woolf, examining the relationship between form and content and analyzing the reasons authors make the stylistic choices they do and how these choices help determine readers' responses. We also put these lessons into practice: Students write several essays, and we often look at samples of student writing in class.
MULTIMEDIA PUBLISHING, PRODUCTION, AND WRITING LAB: BASIC SKILLS, GPUB 6001
Natasha Lennard, Part-Time Faculty
This course provides focused training in key skills for careers in journalism, media, and publishing in two- to three-week intensive units. Topics covered include editing fundamentals, fact finding and research, op-ed writing, profiling, beat reporting, writing pitches, conducting interviews, journalistic ethics, freelance work, career preparedness, and more. Students become versed in the concrete fundamentals of working as a journalist in 2022. They will be prepared to pursue a variety of writing and editing tracks in their future careers, benefiting from the insights and feedback of a working editor (Maya Binyam) and a working journalist and author (Natasha Lennard), which help them identify strengths and weaknesses, better their practice, and focus on areas of the field they’d like to develop beyond this course.
PUBLIC SEMINAR INTERNSHIP, GPUB 6993
James E. Miller, Professor of Liberal Studies and Politics and Faculty Director of Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism
In this internship, students assist in the production and publication of Public Seminar, an independent project of The New School Publishing Initiative. Public Seminar is produced by New School faculty, students, and staff and supported by colleagues and collaborators around the globe.