Each year, professors from across Pratt Institute help reshape the world’s cultural and creative landscape through fresh publications of literature, art, and scholarship. The following is Prattfolio’s roundup of the latest titles including collections of architectural habitats, artistic experiments, poetry, and more.
Do you know of a Pratt faculty book published in 2023 that we should add to our list? Please email Nikolas Slackman, assistant editor of Prattfolio, at nslackma@pratt.edu.
Literature
Who Loves the Sun (Meekling Press)
Fulla Abdul-Jabbar, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Writing; Assistant to the Dean, School of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Who Loves the Sun begins as a study of the scientific poster in an attempt to understand the object and the people who make them. Composed of seven chapters, each taking a different form—from email to lecture to personal essay to mourning diary—Who Loves the Sun ultimately embraces the failure of form. Available from Meekling Press.
The Stars Are Not Yet Bells (Riverhead Books)
Hannah Lillith Assadi, Visiting Instructor, Writing
In her sophomore novel, Hannah Lillith Assadi weaves a story of Elle, a young woman who travels from Savannah to New York City at the height of World War II with her new husband. Assadi’s narrative, written from Elle’s perspective as an elderly woman questioning the events of her past as her memory recedes, from Alzheimer’s, is a “testament to love and loss, inspired by the author’s family history” (The Washington Post). Available from Penguin Random House.
Window Fishing by DK Dyson (Knopf Books for Young Readers)
Rudy Gutierrez, Professor, Undergraduate Communications Design, illustrator
A collaboration between husband and wife, Window Fishing follows the story of a troubled artist finding unexpected inspiration from collaborating with a little boy upstairs. Professor Rudy Gutierrez’s acrylic illustrations run throughout this “kinetic celebration of kindred spirits and the reenergizing power of creativity” (Publishers Weekly). Window Fishing is Gutierrez’s follow up to the Caldecott Honor-winning picture book Double Bass Blues, which he illustrated. Available from Penguin Random House.
The Weight (Simon & Schuster)
Jeff Boyd, Visiting Instructor, Writing
This debut novel from Jeff Boyd explores the life of a young Black musician who finds his way to Portland, Oregon, in the face of adversity and his own sheltered religious upbringing. The Weight is a coming-of-age tale in “this modern age of madness, [where] we’re so often made to carry more than we believe we can manage” (The New York Times Book Review). Available from Simon & Schuster.
Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts (Archway Editions)
Claire Donato, Acting Chair of Writing; Adjunct Associate Professor – CCE
A surreal and psychoanalytic debut story collection from Claire Donato, culminating in a novella-in-vignettes about cooking “Gravity and Grace, the Chicken and the Egg, or: How to Cook Everything Vegetarian.” By synthesizing disparate literary traditions, Donato crafts “stories contemplating grief, disgust, and the myth of romance” (Nylon). Available from Simon & Schuster.
All This Could Be Different (Viking)
Sarah Thankam Mathews, Visiting Assistant Professor, Writing
Sarah Thankam Mathews’s debut, which follows a young Indian immigrant’s coming of age in Milwaukee, is a 2022 National Book Award Finalist and one of Time’s and Slate’s Top 10 Books of the Year. The novel “expertly captures and elevates the position of being a young queer person in the post-recession US with many more questions than answers” (Vogue). Available from Penguin Random House.
Architecture and the Built Environment
Pedagogical Experiments in Architecture for a Changing Climate (Routledge)
Tülay Atak, Adjunct Associate Professor, Undergraduate Architecture; Jonathan Scelsa, Associate Professor, Undergraduate Architecture; Luis Callejas; and Jørgen Johan Tandberg, editors
Lawrence Blough, Professor, Undergraduate Architecture, contributor
This book, forthcoming in early 2024, presents a series of pedagogical experiments that translate climate science research into curriculum by architectural educators. The teaching experiments are presented across four sections framed in essays by the editors: Abstraction, Organization, Building, and Narrative, exposing core parts of an architect’s education through pedagogies that simultaneously provide skills and constructive literacy while instigating environmental sensibilities. Across these sections, the book features 16 chapters, including one by Lawrence Blough and Simone Giostra, who has taught at Pratt and is currently associate professor at Polytechnic University of Milan. The book is geared toward architecture instructors of all levels and academics alike. Available from Routledge.
The Interior Urbanism Theory Reader edited by Gregory Marinic (Routledge)
Harriet Harriss, Professor, Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment; Jonathan Scelsa, Associate Professor, Undergraduate Architecture; Ji Young Kim, Visiting Associate Professor, Interior Design; Deborah Schneiderman, Professor, Interior Design; Alison B. Snyder, Professor, Interior Design; Keena Suh, Professor, Interior Design; and Karin Tehve, Professor, Interior Design, contributors
The Interior Urbanism Theory Reader, forthcoming in early 2024, provides an interdisciplinary lens on how we understand urbanism, interiority, and how “the public” is defined from a global perspective across time and cultures. Encompassing these concepts from ancient origins to speculative futures, 50 essays authored by diverse scholars from around the world expand our understanding of this underexplored phenomenon. Learn more from Routledge.
Architecture’s Theory (MIT Press)
Catherine Ingraham, Professor, Graduate Architecture and Urban Design
This collection of illuminating essays by Catherine Ingraham is an inquiry into the material and philosophical relationship between architecture and theory across the disciplines of art, philosophy, literature, history, and politics. Available from MIT Press.
The Philadelphia School and the Future of Architecture (Routledge)
John Lobell, Professor, Undergraduate Architecture
From 1951 to 1965, the movement that would come to be known as the Philadelphia School transformed modern architecture and how architects, city planners, and educators approached their work and craft. The center of this activity was the University of Pennsylvania, where John Lobell was a student at the time. In his newest book, Lobell shares the history of the movement and its philosophy, introduces ways the movement still has relevance for the future, and reflects on its most influential thinkers, including Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi, Romaldo Giurgola, and Louis Kahn. (The book cover features an image of Dean G. Holmes Perkins, architect of the Philadelphia School.)
Architecture, Film, and the In-Between (Intellect Books)
Jason Vigneri-Beane, Professor, Undergraduate Architecture; Maria Sieira, Adjunct Associate Professor – CCE, Graduate Architecture; and Eva Perez de Vega, Adjunct Associate Professor, Undergraduate Architecture, contributors
In this new work of scholarship, three Pratt architecture professors contribute essays exploring the intersection of the radical ends of the architecture and film disciplines. Jason Vigneri-Beane explores ecology, machines, technology, and atmosphere through near-future scenarios; Maria Sieira examines social-cultural space in the work of French New Wave filmmaker Agnés Varda; and Eva Perez de Vega explores the moving image to reflect on its relationship to the body and what she terms huMan exceptionalism. All three essays read film through critical lenses in the discipline of architecture. Available from Intellect Books.
Poetry
Laura’s Desires (Belladonna*)
Laura Henriksen, BFA Writing ’12, Visiting Assistant Professor, Writing
In this chapbook-length excerpt from faculty member and alumni Laura Henriksen’s eponymous debut poetry collection (forthcoming in 2024 from Nightboat Books), the author’s ludic voice captures “encounters between the speaker and lovers, friends, strangers, art, and the natural world” (Stella-Ann Harris, Air/Light). Available from Belladonna Collaborative.
AErotomania: The Book of Lumenations (Lavender Ink/Diálogos)
Adeena Karasick, Adjunct Professor – CCE, Humanities and Media Studies
Poet, theorist, performance artist, and professor Adeena Karasick’s 14th book of poetry and media studies, AErotomania: The Book of Lumenations, “re-envisions the airplane as an erotic theater, transporting language and meaning to new destinations of passion, politics and pleasure and promise.” Available from Lavender Ink.
Fraternal Light: On Painting While Black—Poems for Beauford Delaney (Kent State University Press)
Arlene Keizer, Professor, Humanities and Media Studies
In her debut poetry collection, humanities professor Arlene Keizer turns her eye to artist Beauford Delaney, an African American painter active in New York from the 1930s to the 1950s and in Paris from the 1950s to the 1970s. Celebrating a long-neglected artist only now receiving more widespread recognition, these poems “track the artist from an awakening to gay desire in the garden of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum . . . to Greenwich Village” (Literary Hub) and across the Atlantic to the City of Light. Available from Kent State University Press.
Neighbor (Ugly Duckling Presse)
Rachel Levitsky, Professor, Writing
The second edition of Rachel Levitsky’s sophomore full-length poetry collection incorporates an expanded version of her play Perfect California: A Family Affair. Levitsky’s work “draws many unexpected connections, sometimes to dizzying effect” (Publishers Weekly). Available from Ugly Duckling Presse.
Manuel d’amour environnemental (Palais de Tokyo)
Yi Xin Tong, Assistant Professor, Foundation
Translated as Environmental Love Manual, Yi Xin Tong’s poetry collection was published on the occasion of the first Choi Foundation Prize for Contemporary Art, awarded to the author. Published in a bilingual French-Chinese edition, this book of Tong’s poems is a simultaneously humorous and melancholy reflection on life at the intersection of nature and the city. Available from Palais de Tokyo.
kochanie, today i bought bread (World Poetry Books)
Uljana Wolf, Visiting Professor, Writing
In Uljana Wolf’s debut book-length collection of poetry, the German writer explores European history through lyricism and wordplay. Her poems, translated from German by Greg Nissan, “open up a wide historical space” (Badische Zeitung). Available from World Poetry Books.
Art and Design
Ecophilia (Available Items)
Constantin Boym, Professor, Industrial Design
Constantin Boym was on sabbatical at his home in rural Esopus, New York, from 2022 to 2023 when he started researching the habitats and living spaces of animals in his area. Ecophilia collects these experiments into a book for anyone to recreate, with instructive plans and photographs for readers to construct habitats for creatures from birds to toads. Learn more at Available Items.
Paperfold Wild Animals: 10 Amazing Punch-Out-and-Fold Paper Creatures (Workman Publishing Company)
Megan Cash, BFA Communications Design (Graphic Design) ’86; Professor, Undergraduate Communications Design
Geared at kids seven and up, Paperfold Wild Animals is an interactive activity book of fun, simple paper-folding techniques that allow young readers to create 3D creatures from flat pieces of paper—no scissors or glue required. With interlocking tabs and only two simple types of folds, this book combines hands-on, mess-free crafting with fun facts about every animal featured. Available from Hachette Book Group.
The Art and Science of UX Design (Pearson)
Anthony Conta, Visiting Assistant Professor, School of Information
A guide on crafting user experiences (UX) for product designers who desire practical, hands-on instruction for building digital products, Anthony Conta’s book takes readers step by step through the necessary tools for creation and useful perspectives toward problem solving with real world references, individual exercises for the reader, and examples of what good looks like for a project. Available from Peachpit.
Can You See What I See?
Sandra Erbacher, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Foundation
This limited-edition publication borrows its format from the children’s activity book to analyze the entanglement of warfare and early childhood education. Consisting of hidden-object puzzle games, like “Spot the Sniper,” and coloring pages with line-based camouflage patterns from around the world, Can You See What I See? highlights the complex relationship between politics and aesthetics. Learn more on the artist’s website.
Whereupon (Palermo Publishing) and Innamorato (Meteoro Editions)
Allen Frame, Adjunct Professor – CCE, Photography
Allen Frame, a prolific photographer and writer with roots in New York’s downtown art scene, has released two books this year, each highlighting distinct eras of his work. Whereupon features a selection of black-and-white and color photography spanning the late ’70s into the early ’90s. The book contains portraits of the artist’s friends in their homes and on the streets of New York throughout this period. Available from Palermo Publishing. Innamorato collects three of the photographer’s recent works incorporating found photographs acquired at Roman flea markets. The work, first exhibited at the Pratt Institute Photography Gallery, weaves “fantasies into the private lives of these unknown figures, presumably deceased” (Artforum). Available from Meteoro Editions.
When Eye Land by Star Feliz (Printed Matter)
Duncan Hamilton, Professor, Undergraduate Communications Design
Recently shortlisted for the Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards, Duncan Hamilton’s latest book-design project, When Eye Land, builds on artist Star Feliz’s research-based installation work. Assembled from materials including colonial maps and the artist’s own family albums, When Eye Land looks at the ways that a “legacy of colonialism has shaped the national identity of the Dominican Republic.” Available from Printed Matter.
Official Guide: I Have Seen the Future (¡AGITPOP PRESS!)
Johannah Herr, Visiting Instructor, Foundation
¡AGITPOP PRESS! is an artist book collaboration between Johannah Herr and writer Cara Marsh Sheffler. An accompaniment to Herr’s body of work of the same title, their tongue-in-cheek “guide” offers a speculative vision of what the 1964 World’s Fair would have looked like had it accurately predicted the present day. Images of Herr’s bright, flocked architectural models of the show are featured as pavilion theme centers, alongside appropriated critical text posed as attractions and rides; advertisements with altered text; and Sheffler’s essays, inviting us to question who was modeling our future and why. Available from Printed Matter.
Stephen Hilger: In the Alley (Purple Martin Press)
Stephen Hilger, Associate Professor, Photography
This retrospective monograph, printed in a “leporello” or accordion style, features Stephen Hilger’s photography of service alleys behind houses in Beverly Hills, California. Edited by former Pratt photography professor Peter Kayafas, with an essay by Matthew Specktor, the book is a visual investigation into class and the tension between public and private space, with the photographs “inverting the expected order so that the world we are used to seeing as dominant—that of rich people, the one that is usually fetishized of glamorized by the lens—is concealed, while that which is overlooked is instead foregrounded” (Los Angeles Review of Books). Available from Artbook | D.A.P.
The Studio-X Istanbul Kitabı
Thomas Klinkowstein, Adjunct Professor – CCE, Graduate Communications Design
This wide-spanning retrospective features interviews, articles, and documentation on the 600+ events hosted by Studio-X Istanbul, an “urban laboratory” examining issues Turkey’s largest city faces in the present and future. The book features professor Thomas Klinkowstein’s 10-meter-long installation The Universe Emerges From Information: 10-43 Seconds in the State of Awareness of an Exo-Designer, 2055, a “diagrammatic representation that presents a very small slice in time in the conscious and unconscious thoughts of a designer in the year 2055” (Hofstra). The project was shown at Studio-X in a show curated by Esen Karol, MS Communications Design ’93. Learn more at Super Pool.
Gestures by Subject Bureaux
Emily R. Pellerin, Professor, Undergraduate Communications Design, editor and contributor
Both edited by and featuring a foreword and interlude from Emily R. Pellerin, Gestures is the newest release from design studio Subject Bureaux. The book presents a text-based collection of descriptions of the way people wear their clothes, investigating identity through detailed, anonymous written portraiture. Learn more on the Subject Bureaux website.
What Is Psychedelic (Mishkin Gallery and Pioneer Works Press)
Aura Rosenberg, Adjunct Professor – CCE, Photography
This artbook is complete with full-color plates of Aura Rosenberg’s formally inventive photography, film, painting, and sculpture over 50 years. It features essays from the likes of Pratt graduate Alaina Claire Feldman, BFA Art History and Critical Visual Studies; actor-director Lena Dunham; and writer, critic, and curator Bob Nickas. This retrospective of Rosenberg’s work displays the artist’s “witty mash-ups of classicism, op-art, photography, abstract painting, appropriation and—especially—freewheeling collaborations with fellow artists” (The New York Times). Available from Pioneer Works.
Jason Stopa: Garden of Music (Diane Rosenstein Gallery)
Jason Stopa, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Fine Arts
A full-color catalog covering Jason Stopa’s paintings exhibited at Diane Rosenstein Gallery from May 20 to July 1, 2023, in the solo exhibition Garden of Music. The publication includes an essay by Alex Bacon, a curatorial associate at the Princeton University Art Museum, and a foreword by Stopa himself. Learn more at Diane Rosenstein Gallery.
Sustainability and Environment
Aquatopia: Climate Interventions (Routledge India)
Terra Aqua: The Amphibious Lifeworlds of Coastal and Maritime South Asia (Routledge UK)
May Joseph, Professor, Social Science and Cultural Studies, editor
Grounding its analysis in Harmattan Theater’s site-specific performances, Aquatopia: Climate Interventions contributes to discussions on climate change, urbanism, and postcoloniality/decoloniality. Coedited with Sofia Varino, this book features close descriptions of five performances supplemented by digital documentation accessible online, and is designed for pedagogical access. Available from Routledge.
Also this year, May Joseph worked with Sudipta Sen to edit Terra Aqua, an anthology with contributions from historians, anthropologists, and environmentalists investigating the in-between lifeworlds of South Asia that are neither fully aquatic or terrestrial. Available from Routledge.
Reimagining Sustainable Cities: Strategies for Designing Greener, Healthier, More Equitable Communities (University of California Press)
Christina Rosan, Visiting Assistant Professor, Creative Enterprise Leadership, and Stephen M. Wheeler
Reimagining Sustainable Cities: Strategies for Designing Greener, Healthier, More Equitable Communities asks big-picture questions on the role of cities in the midst of our current climate crisis. A solutions-oriented analysis with an interdisciplinary approach, this book is “an enlightening survey of today’s cities” (Nature). Available from UC Press.
History
The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront (Duke University Press)
Cisco Bradley, Associate Professor, Social Science and Cultural Studies
Cisco Bradley’s new book chronicles the Brooklyn experimental music scene, from its roots in Williamsburg, to its growth into an international phenomenon, to its continued incubation of new sounds in Bushwick and Red Hook. Featuring recordings, interviews, and other archival materials, the book’s focus on the growth of the music and its stalwart struggle against encroaching gentrification tells a broader story of, as Bradley puts it, “the struggle of artists of all disciplines to find art space, to nurture their artforms, and to build a healthy community of like-minded creators.” Available from Duke University Press.
Action Research and Critical Psychology: An Investigation of Subjectivity and Participation (Springer)
Martin Dege, Assistant Professor, Social Science and Cultural Studies
The history of action research, a form of study which intends to simultaneously investigate and solve an issue, gets a thorough analysis in Martin Dege’s new book. Dege’s work introduces the theories of critical psychologist Klaus Holzkamp in a new light and reflects on the implications of bringing together empirical social science research and political action. Learn more at Springer.
Design, Displacement, Migration: Spatial and Material Histories (Routledge)
Sarah A. Lichtman, Chair of History of Art and Design, and Jilly Traganou, editors
In this new compendium of multimodal texts collected by History of Art and Design chair Sarah A. Lichtman, readers will find rich investigations into how displacement is and can be used as a lens for understanding principles of design and its histories. The book includes works that span “design, art, and architectural history; design studies; curation; poetry; activism; and social sciences.” Available from Routledge.
Collaborative Social Design with Mexican Indigenous Communities: Critical Craft and Transformative Practices (Routledge)
Carmen Malvar, Adjunct Professor, Interior Design
Following a collaborative case study centering indigenous artisans in Mexico, this book covers the work of anthropologists, designers, and ethnographers, and builds off of it. Featuring field notes, conversations with the indigenous artisan communities, workshops, and prototypes, Collaborative Social Design speaks to the necessity of decolonial approaches to design while providing practical guidance. Learn more at Routledge.
Taste (Routledge)
Karin Tehve, Professor, Interior Design
This new work of scholarship from Karin Tehve examines how definitions of taste have evolved over the last 200 years, influencing how design is understood and valued by both consumers and designers. Containing 70 illustrations, Taste’s 10 chapters each analyze taste’s reciprocal relationship with media, from books to zines to algorithms, and is a resource for students and scholars of interior design and related design fields. Learn more at Routledge.
Race, War, and the Cinematic Myth of America: Dust That Never Settles (Rowman & Littlefield)
Eric Trenkamp, Assistant Chair, Film/Video; Lecturer; Visiting Instructor
In this paperback reissue of Eric Trenkamp’s debut monograph, the filmmaker and researcher traces the history of white supremacy across American cinematic storytelling. From examples in early silent cinema up to today’s proliferation of comic book adaptations, Trenkamp shows how Hollywood created and continues to reinvent the myth of the white savior. Available from Rowman & Littlefield.
Do you know of a Pratt faculty book published in 2023 that we should add to our list? Please email Nikolas Slackman, assistant editor of Prattfolio, at nslackma@pratt.edu.