Current Courses

Please consult the New School Course Catalog for a full course list. Spring 2021 courses include:

• Design & The Future of Publishing, GPUB 5002
  Jesse Seegers, Part-time Faculty 
  
  This course is specifically designed to serve as a broad foundation for students from non-design backgrounds to give form to content. This is a hands-on studio course that will begin with projects that investigate 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 across both printed and digital platforms. 
  
  
• American Dialectics: Art in New York after 1942, GPUB 5310
  Jed Perl, Part-time Assistant Professor
  
  Since the end of World War II, art in New York has been animated by five powerful dialectical conflicts: between the artist and the public; abstraction and representation; romanticism and empiricism; spontaneity and reflection; nihilism and tradition. Nearly all of these conflicts originated in the earlier history of European modernism, and in “American Dialectics” we will see how Old World ideas achieved a new weight, thrust, velocity, and impact as they were reshaped amid the exuberant forces of New York, the melting pot city. In a course that will range from Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Joan Mitchell to Andy Warhol, Lee Bontecou, and Donald Judd, we will see how a variety of dialectical ways of thinking—ranging from Hegelian idealism to Kierkegaard’s Either/Or to Hans Hofmann’s Push/Pull—helped shape the artist’s evolving sense of self and society in the rush-hour city of the postwar years. Readings will focus on writings by artists, critics, and other movers and shakers of the period, including Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Peggy Guggenheim, Barnett Newman, Edwin Denby, Anni Albers, Grace Hartigan, Susan Sontag, Morton Feldman, and John Cage. Our exploration of overarching historical and theoretical forces will be grounded in close analysis of primary sources both visual and verbal. Where possible, classroom sessions will be supplemented by visits to galleries, museums, and relevant New York City landmarks. This exploration of developments in the visual arts in the decades after World War II will leave students with the theoretical and analytical tools needed to locate and interpret particular artistic developments within a broader social and historical context.
  
  
• Odysseys, GPUB 5833 
  Melissa Monroe, Part-time Assistant Professor
  
  Homer’s Odyssey is among the most important foundational texts of Western literature. A work that has become the paradigm for the heroic voyage, it has a vast tonal and thematic range, addressing exile, homecoming, fidelity, honor, deception, the characteristics of a civilized society, and the relations between men and women, parents and children, and individuals and their social groups. Countless subsequent authors have used elements of Homer’s epic as starting points; in fact, the story has become the basis for an ongoing conversation among writers, who revisit its characters and tropes as part of the never-ending effort to define the role of literature in helping us understand our lives. In this course, we look at the Odyssey itself and some of the works of poetry, fiction and drama it has inspired. We spend the first month reading the Odyssey, then devote four sessions to Joyce’s Ulysses. After that, we turn to other authors who have taken the Odyssey as a point of departure, including Derek Walcott, Louis Aragon, Jean Giraudoux, and Margaret Atwood, and consider how each author uses elements of the original epic for his or her own purposes, in order to explore some of Homer’s major themes for audiences living in a world very distant from that of the ancient Greeks. We also consider the cumulative effect of this tradition of reimagining: how each new version explicitly or implicitly comments on previous versions, creating a metafictional narrative that becomes part of the story itself.
   
  
• Multimedia Publishing, Production and Writing Lab: Advanced, GPUB 6002
  Jon Baskin, Associate Director, Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism, and Jesse Seegers, Part-time Faculty
  
  In this hands-on seminar, students will collaborate on an original publication. Early in the course, students will apply for roles in the creation of a new magazine with a theme and design concept that the class will choose together. Each student will focus primarily on editorial, marketing, design, or production, although there will be opportunities for them to take on more than one role. Basic design skills (familiarity with Illustrator, Photshop, InDesign) are required, and priority will be given to students in CPCJ who have completed the introductory course. Students will improve their ability to write, work with a team in a publishing environment, and learn about emerging phenomena in creative publishing, establishing them as strong entry-level candidates for a variety of careers in contemporary media. The end goal of the class will be to produce a magazine and a website with a focus on the landscape of creative publishing in New York. In the process, we will mimic the atmosphere of a working magazine, with writers, editors and design teams working in collaboration. Students will be given individual tasks as well as expected to meet with their classmates, both during class time and outside of class, to complete the collaborative aspects of the process. Professors will oversee the project and help with skill acquisition on a case-by-case basis, including knowledge of the Adobe Suite, HTML, CSS, Wordpress, printing techniques and editorial protocol. There will be a strong emphasis on practical, professional development by the course’s professors, helping students learn how to interface effectively with professionals as applicants or employees in journalism and publishing beyond the confines of the classroom. Each student will emerge from the course with a portfolio-building example of their work, having learned how to connect with a public readership through promotional efforts and events. 
  
  
• Master's Seminar in Critical and Creative Writing, GPUB 6301
  Melissa Monroe, Part-time Assistant Professor
  
  An intensive workshop for students working on major writing projects such as an MA thesis, a piece of long-form journalism, or an integrated writing portfolio for professional use. The course is organized as an ongoing process of peer review supervised by the faculty. The aim is to create a collective setting that can help students improve their own writing and hone their critical skills though constructive engagement with others’ work. This course is open to BA/MA students; please email the instructor for permission to register.