This year, publishers released more than 30 diverse, innovative works of creativity, scholarship, and research authored, edited, and featuring contributions by Pratt Institute faculty. Artists and authors share new experiments in photography, language, storytelling, and more. Historians present new looks at topics like the Philadelphia School, white supremacy in American film, and how fashion has shaped culture. Many offer suggestions toward the creation of a better world, from a philosophical reframing of the Anthropocene to a forthcoming compilation of writers of color on navigating pregnancy and loss. Read on to learn more.
Do you know of a Pratt faculty book published in 2022 that we should add to our list? Please email Jean Hartig at jhartig@pratt.edu.
Supertall (W. W. Norton)
Stefan Al, Visiting Associate Professor, Graduate Architecture and Urban Design
When it comes to the supertall, the type of skyscraper megastructure that is reshaping cities worldwide, Stefan Al is among those who know them best. The Dutch-born architect codesigned Guangzhou’s Canton Tower, which was briefly the tallest structure in the world. In his newest book, Al provides an overview of the technology that makes these buildings possible and how approaches taken by Hong Kong, London, New York, and Singapore have impacted the people who live and work in these places—with “a lot of rich history . . . well and concisely told” (New York Times). With supertalls’ potential to contribute to inequality, climate change, and the transmission of contagions, Al points to the latest innovations that can address these challenges as urban areas around the world continue to expand.
Stranger Things: The Ultimate Pop-Up Book (Reinhart Pop-Up Studio)
Simon Arizpe, BFA Communications Design (Illustration) ’06; Visiting Instructor, Undergraduate Communications Design
The latest from paper engineer, illustrator, and author Simon Arizpe is Stranger Things: The Ultimate Pop-Up Book. This intricately designed, interactive 3D title offers fans of the Emmy Award–winning Netflix series the chance to experience the first three seasons of the show anew. With original artwork by illustrator Kyle Lambert and creative direction from Matthew Reinhart, the book introduces elaborate recreations of iconic moments in Hawkins, Indiana, and the Upside Down—including a few hidden surprises tucked into Arizpe’s innovative, 360-degree design.
The Autobiography of a Language (Futurepoem)
Mirene Arsanios, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Writing
In her third book, Lebanese writer and editor Mirene Arsanios builds upon explorations of language and identity begun in her previous books, the critical-poetic essay Notes on Mother Tongues and her short story collection The City Outside the Sentence. For The Autobiography of Language, Arsanios presents “genre-defying writing” (Mónica de la Torre) created in “devastating candor” (Omar Berrada) that “neither assembles a life story nor seeks a fashionable hybrid identity” (Iman Mersal).
Ancient Egyptian Animal Fables: Tree Climbing Hippos and Ennobled Mice (Brill)
Jennifer Miyuki Babcock, Assistant Professor, History of Art and Design
In this new work of scholarship, part of Brill’s Culture and History of the Ancient Near East series, Egyptologist Jennifer Miyuki Babcock considers Ancient Egypt’s depictions of anthropomorphic animals. Cats, canines, birds, and other animals dress in linen kilts, attend banquets, play music, and take part in a variety of other human activities. The first art historical treatment of ostraca and papyri, Babcock’s text considers these artworks in relationship to storytelling, iconography, aesthetic value, and more.
La Luz También Viaja (Matarile Ediciones)
Genesis Báez, Visiting Assistant Professor, Photography
La Luz También Viaja (Light Also Travels) presents a selection of photographs from Genesis Báez’s ongoing body of work taking place in Puerto Rico and the Northeast United States. Inspired by fragmented connections across diasporic life, Báez captures ways people relate to place, history, imagination, and community. The works included here range from landscapes, still lifes, and gestures enacted with women family members, or women who remind Báez of her family.
Ambiguous Territory (Actar)
Cathryn Dwyre, Adjunct Associate Professor, Undergraduate Architecture, coeditor
Catherine Ingraham, Professor, Graduate Architecture and Urban Design, contributing author
Recently the subject of a symposium and exhibitions around the country, the ideas explored in Ambiguous Territory are now collected in one volume with offerings from more than 40 architects, artists, and scholars. Organized around three primary areas of investigation—the atmospheric, the biologic, and the geologic—Ambiguous Territory reimagines the role of art and design in humanity’s changing relationship with Earth.
Leporello N° 05 (ll’Editions)
Shannon Ebner, Chair of Photography
Artist Shannon Ebner’s latest publication is a limited-edition 10-panel accordion artist book presented as a part of the Leporello series from ll’Editions. For her volume, Ebner shares a single work, RIME ICE—an outtake from her recent exhibition FRET SCAPES—which refers to the meteorological term for supercooled water droplets that freeze onto a surface. Working in both photography and language, RIME ICE employs Ebner’s WET LETTER alphabet, which she created by photographing paper letters pasted to a wall inside a building using only water.
The Double Lamp of Solitude (Rising Tide Projects)
Joshua Edwards, Visiting Assistant Professor, Humanities and Media Studies
For his newest release, poet Joshua Edwards brings together texts, translations, and photography in what Heather Green calls an “artfully layered new volume” (Harriet Books). The book meditates on time, relationships, reading, society, and solitude, and includes a section inspired by long walks Edwards took between the birth and death places of poets Miguel Hernández, Friederich Hölderlin, and Federico García Lorca.
Plant Life: The Entangled Politics of Afforestation (University of Minnesota Press)
Landscapes of Retreat (K. Verlag)
Rosetta S. Elkin, Academic Director, Master of Landscape Architecture Program; Visiting Associate Professor, Graduate Architecture and Urban Design
With two new titles, landscape architect, designer, and scholar Rosetta S. Elkin questions assumptions around human mastery over the environment and makes the case for awareness of the landscapes we engage with as a critical tool to address climate change.
In Plant Life, Elkin provides a multifaceted overview of afforestation, a common planting process at the center of billion-tree programs. Afforestation is the planting of trees where trees rarely grow; including deserts, grasslands, and steppes. With case studies on scientific forestry in the American prairies, colonial control in Africa’s Sahelian grasslands, and China’s efforts to administer territory, Elkin’s research shows the limits and unintended consequences of human intervention at the continental scale.
Landscapes of Retreat tells the stories of places around the world where human settlements are shifting due to climate change and what these “retreats” mean for the land that is left behind. Elkin reveals that when communities have an appreciation for the landscape, they are more likely to adapt and even value retreat as an important way to adapt to change. Landscapes of Retreat features a companion website with additional material and recommended cases for further study.
So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy (Haymarket Books)
Aracelis Girmay, Writer in Residence, Writing, editor
Mendi Lewis Obadike, Associate Professor, Humanities and Media Studies, contributing author
Forthcoming in February 2023 is a new anthology of mostly original interviews, essays, poems, and analysis on pregnancy, abortion, loss, and birth, with a primary focus in the US. Edited by poet Aracelis Girmay, So We Can Know includes Black, Indigenous, Asian, Latinx, and Arab voices and features authors such as Elizabeth Alexander, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, and Patricia Smith—as well as Girmay’s fellow Pratt faculty member Mendi Lewis Obadike. All royalty proceeds will go to three reproductive health organizations that center people of color.
The Wild Life: A Joe the Bouncer Novel (Mysterious Press)
David Gordon, Adjunct Professor CCE, Writing
The Wild Life is the latest installment of David Gordon’s crime thriller series about Joe Brody, an ex–Special Forces operative who was expelled from Harvard and now splits his time between a job as a bouncer and serving as the de facto sheriff for New York City’s underworld. In this fourth installment, Joe struggles with addiction as he hunts for a predator who has been kidnapping highly desirable sex workers.
Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta (Little, Brown)
James Hannaham, Professor, Writing
James Hannaham’s third novel tells the story of Carlotta Mercedes, a Black Colombian trans woman, as she leaves prison to reenter a now-gentrified New York City that has changed beyond recognition. Mixing humor with tragedy in what Kirkus calls a “brash, ambitious novel carried by an unforgettable narrator,” Hannaham takes readers along Carlotta’s journey to rebuild her life as she struggles to reconnect with her son, navigate a broken parole system, and find her place in a family that is reluctant to accept her true identity.
Working at the Intersection: Architecture After the Anthropocene (Design Studio 2022, Volume 4, RIBA Publishing)
Harriet Harriss, Professor, Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment (Dean, School of Architecture, 2019–2022), and Naomi House, coeditors and contributing authors
Ariane Harrison, Visiting Associate Professor, Graduate Architecture and Urban Design, contributing author
In this collection of essays and case studies, leading architects, philosophers, artists, and authors imagine opportunities for architecture to address environmental and social justice in a world beyond the human-dominated Anthropocene age.
Harriet Harriss’s essay with coauthor Naomi House titled “Non-Binary Ecologies?” considers how our thoughts and actions might differ if they existed outside today’s knowledge frameworks. The idea of the starchitect, for example, might trade its exclusive authority for an acknowledgment of all contributors.
For Ariane Harrison, post-Anthropocene architecture begins with expansion: designing habitats for Earth’s more than two million nonhuman species. Through projects such as her firm’s Pollinators Pavilion, Harrison aims to show architecture’s creative potential to rehabilitate species and ensure biodiversity.
How to Live at the End of the World: Theory, Art, and Politics for the Anthropocene (Stanford University Press)
Travis Holloway, Adjunct Associate Professor, Social Science and Cultural Studies
Philosopher and poet Travis Holloway’s newest work of scholarship invites readers to reframe their understanding of the Anthropocene, the current geological era dominated by human activity. Working within the lenses of time, art, and politics, Holloway builds a case for opportunities amid looming climate catastrophe to shift the human narrative and find new ways to live collectively.
The Unwritten Book: An Investigation (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Samantha Hunt, Professor, Writing
The Unwritten Book is the first work of nonfiction by Samantha Hunt, award-winning author of four books of fiction. Hunt blends memoir with literary criticism, history, and unpublished writing from her father as she explores ideas about ghosts and the experience of being haunted. (Part of the book looks at Pratt’s campus as a site of historic hauntings.) For Hunt, ghosts range from human spirits to long lists of unread books. In a review for Esquire, Adrienne Westenfeld calls The Unwritten Book “eerie, profound, and daring,” adding that “this is a book only the inimitable Hunt could write.”
City Shapers: Stories of Immigrant Designers
Sara Jazayeri, Visiting Assistant Professor, Undergraduate Architecture
The architects who established the Immigrant Architects Coalition published this new volume of essays to help build bridges among US-based architects, interior designers, engineers, and other design professionals from diverse countries and backgrounds. Sara Jazayeri, founding principal of Studio 360, an award-winning architecture and interior design firm, contributes her globetrotting story to City Shapers alongside essays from two dozen fellow architects and leaders from around the world who are making their mark in the US.
Massaging the Medium: Seven Pechakuchas (Institute of General Semantics)
Adeena Karasick, Adjunct Professor CCE, Humanities and Media Studies
To create her latest offering, poet, artist, and performer Adeena Karasick adapted seven pechakucha presentations, created for various national and international academic, literary, media ecology, and general semantics conferences over the past seven years, retranslating their artworks and texts for book format. The pechakucha is a presentation style first developed in Tokyo in which a storyteller presents 20 slides for 20 seconds each. The result for Massaging the Medium is 140 original collage illustrations and hybrid essays that, as Karasick notes, “reread culture through a semiological, media ecological, deconstructionist, Jewish feminist lens, focusing on the relational contingencies of communication, spirituality, technology, and language.”
Planning Theory and Practice: Repair and Healing in Planning (Volume 23, Issue 3)
Courtney Knapp, Associate Professor, Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment, coeditor
In this edition of Planning Theory and Practice, Courtney Knapp and coeditors Jocelyn Poe and John Forester bring together essays that explore the reparative potential of planning, and the complex challenges planners face in the practice of addressing historical harms, through real-world case studies. Aiming to create conditions for thriving communities amid the past’s harsh shadow, the editors note, requires dialogue, action, acknowledgment, and atonement, demonstrated in the practice-based experiences their contributors highlight. The essays carry common threads that resonate with guiding principles the editors have identified in their work—“radical honesty, confronting whiteness, and radical imagination,” critical components of the “forward–facing, freedom-seeking project” of reparative praxis.
Knapp also published the essay “Lessons for Planners from Richmond, Virginia’s Marcus David Peters Circle” in Planning Theory and Practice in January 2022.
Appropriate(d) Interiors (Routledge)
Anca I. Lasc, Associate Professor, History of Art and Design, coeditor, and Deborah Schneiderman, Professor, Interior Design, and Karin Tehve, Associate Professor, Interior Design, coeditors and contributing authors
Erica Morawski, Assistant Professor, History of Art and Design; Keena Suh, Associate Professor, Interior Design; and Karyn Zieve, Assistant Professor and Lecturer, History of Art and Design, section editors and contributing authors
Irina Schneid, Assistant Professor, Interior Design, contributing author
How do interiors play a part in expressing or transgressing dominant societal values? Appropriate(d) Interiors explores standards, assumptions, codes, and conventions in interior design from the late 18th century onward with essays from scholars and practitioners from around the globe, including Pratt faculty members of Interior Design and History of Art and Design. Its essays cover a wide range of topics, from Deborah Schneiderman and Liliya Dzis’s examination of how public space in New York City was converted into outdoor dining areas at the height of COVID-19, to Graeme Brooker’s proposal to embrace care and maintenance as sustainable forms of design. Notably, this volume contains a comprehensive history and analysis of the Stalled! project by Joel Sanders, interrogating the relationship of gender, justice, and the built environment.
Another 2022 book edited by Anca I. Lasc, Revisiting the Past in Museums and at Historic Sites (Routledge), was highlighted in Prattfolio’s 2021 faculty books roundup.
The Urban Politics of Policy Failure (Routledge)
John Lauermann, Associate Professor, School of Information; Faculty Director, Spatial Analysis and Visualization Initiative, and Cristina Temenos, coeditors
In his newest book, urban geographer John Lauermann, along with coeditor Cristina Temenos, argues that as much can be learned from failed public policies as those that have found success. The Urban Politics of Policy Failure considers how systems of urban governance affect policies that do not move past the planning stage or meet their stated goals, whether from poor administration or funding, or political opposition.
Immutable: Designing History (Onomatopee Projects)
Chris Lee, Assistant Professor, Undergraduate Communications Design
How can graphic design resolve its relationship with systems of power? In Immutable, Chris Lee probes the question through an exploration of documents—“design’s most consequential forms,” Lee asserts—spanning some 5,000 years, from Mesopotamian clay tablets used for accounting, to passports and property deeds, to records on the blockchain, aiming to illuminate new directions for graphic design as a field.
Also this year, Lee and Chair of Undergraduate Communications Design Jessica Wexler contributed essays to After the Bauhaus, Before the Internet: A History of Graphic Design Pedagogy (no place press), edited by Geoff Kaplan, who assembled more than 40 design practitioners, scholars, and educators for this look at graphic design teaching from the mid-1950s to the mid-1990s.
To Die Alive (Damiani)
Matthew Leifheit, Adjunct Associate Professor, Photography
Since 2014, photographer Matthew Leifheit has been documenting Fire Island and the evolution of its intergenerational gay community. Seventy-seven pieces from this body of work come together in his artist book To Die Alive. The collection ranges from portraits of desire to multilayered landscapes that reflect the island’s history and changing future. In a review for Document, Morgan Becker describes the book as “poignant and reflective, raising questions on the nature of assimilation, queer representation, and cultural preservation.” Accompanying Leifheit’s photographs are texts by playwright Jeremy O. Harris and poet Jack Parlett.
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.)
Leading as if Life Matters
Mary McBride, Chair, Arts and Cultural Management and Design Management; Maren Maier, Visiting Associate Professor, Design Management; and Xue Bai, MPS Arts and Cultural Management ’21, Advisor to the Chair for Curriculum and Instruction and Visiting Assistant Professor, Design Management
In their recent book, Mary McBride, Maren Maier, and Xue Bai invite leaders in the realms of design, culture, and beyond to rethink how we work, toward more holistically minded, creative, and sustainable human enterprise. Especially poignant in this transformational time as we continue to grapple with COVID-19 and its impact on society and work, this book is a call to action for change makers to help shape a more livable future.
Participation (Coffee House Press)
Anna Moschovakis, Adjunct Associate Professor CCE, Writing
In a starred review, Publishers Weekly praises Anna Moschovakis’s lyrical novel Participation for its “structurally surprising and impeccably executed narrative . . . formal innovation at its finest.” The story centers around an intellectual woman and the members of two reading groups, Love and Anti-Love. Through the novel’s short, fragmented sections, the protagonist and her groups contend with a strained political environment, the potential for climate collapse, and their own deepening and unraveling relationships.
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Social Media’s Influence on Fashion, Ethics, and Property (Duke University Press)
Minh-Ha T. Pham, Associate Professor, Humanities and Media Studies
Minh-Ha T. Pham’s newest book, which made Vulture’s list of most-anticipated fall releases, examines the growing impact social media users are having on fashion and perceived cases of plagiarism and design theft within the industry. Pham challenges the supremacy of Western copyright laws and understanding of intellectual property, and shows how while digital activists may be driven by good intentions, their actions can also deepen social and market inequality, reinforcing unexamined biases, amplifying bad data, and emphasizing neocolonial property norms.
Studio Visit (Inventory Press)
Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Photography
Oscar Bedford, Spring 2022 Visiting Assistant Professor, Photography, contributing author
Studio Visit, Sara Greenberger Rafferty’s first monograph, chronicles two decades of her artistic practice, from case studies of major works to sketches, notes, and studio documentation. In leiu of a monographic essay, art historian Kate Nesin wrote 50-to-100-word “alt text” image descriptions of each of the artworks reproduced in the volume. The more than 200-page book features writing from scholars and artists including Oscar Bedford, who contributes personal reflections on her vision and impact as an educator in his essay “Sara Greenberger Rafferty Wants to Dance with You.”
The Garden or the Empire (Like Literally Press)
Evan Rehill, Lecturer; Professor, Humanities and Media Studies
The Garden or the Empire brings together a decade of short stories by author and curator Evan Rehill. With cover art by Paul Wackers, the book is the first comprehensive collection of Rehill’s short stories. The limited edition pressing sold out shortly after its release in September, but a copy of the book is available at Pratt’s Brooklyn campus library, and many of Rehill’s stories can be found in the journals that originally published them, such as American Short Fiction, Fourteen Hills, and The Literary Review.
Monsters (Mast Books/Pre-Echo Press)
Nick Relph, Visiting Assistant Professor, Photography
Nick Relph’s Monsters is a companion to his lauded 2021 book Eclipse Body & Soul Syntax, which collected images made with a handheld library scanner of architectural renderings posted outside New York City building sites. In Monsters, Relph presents about half of the 1,000 scans of payphone enclosures he has made in New York and Los Angeles. Along with the central image, the library scanner’s technology collects ephemeral interruptions such as stickers, food waste, and electrical cables, providing an unconventional documentation of two changing cities.
IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science: Sustainable Lifecycle (Volume 1101, Number 6)
Audrey Schultz, Chair, Construction Management, Facilities Management, and Real Estate Practice, contributing author
In their paper for the CIB World Building Congress, published in IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science, Audrey Schultz and collaborator Nora Johanne Klungseth (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) present new data on how sustainable management practices link to success in facilities management. Focusing on sustainable practices that include methods of visual management, like labeling and color coding, and lean management, which aims to reduce waste and make the most of resources, they illustrate how facilities management operations that incorporate these methods can help improve employee experience and bring value to organizations.
Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia (Counterpoint Press)
Adrian Shirk, BFA Writing ’11; Adjunct Associate Professor, Writing
When Adrian Shirk and her husband became primary caretakers for her middle-aged father-in-law, the financial, professional, and personal stresses launched her search for a different future, by investigating the past, where the history of American utopian experiments might yield an answer for her present. Shirk combines memoir and research as she explores ideas of utopia and the pursuit of a more communal life under late capitalism. Publishers Weekly calls the book “a winning survey of the desire to make the world a better place.”
More Food Is Not the Answer: Using Systems Thinking to Build Sustainable Food Systems for Seniors (Nova Science Publishers)
Denise Tahara, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Design Management, contributing author
The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal number two aims to eradicate hunger, with a target of 2030—but as the UN itself reports, the current trajectory points toward more than 840 million people being affected by hunger by that year. This book, edited by Adriana Fillol Mazo and Miguel Ángel Martín López of University of Seville, examines this global public health crisis from a range of vantages, and Denise Tahara contributes a chapter focusing on food insecurity among seniors. Approaching the issue from a systems level, Tahara looks at how thoughtfully designed solutions based on patient experiences, with collaboration among health, medical, and social services, can address food access for those 65 and older.
Worn: A People’s History of Clothing (Pantheon)
Sofi Thanhauser, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Writing
In this debut work of nonfiction, Sofi Thanhauser brings together years of research and reporting from around the world to craft a vast history of how clothing, fashion, and the construction of garments have shaped societies. Worn considers issues of politics, labor, the environment, and more as she presents stories told through five different materials: linen, cotton, silk, synthetics, and wool. Glamour calls Worn “a must-read for anyone who takes fashion seriously.”
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 debut monograph, filmmaker Eric Trenkamp 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. The book further examines how the film industry’s adoption of this narrative has acted as propaganda for government policy that dehumanizes populations within the United States and abroad.
Top Stories (Primary Information)
Anne Turyn, Adjunct Professor CCE, Photography
From 1978 to 1991, photographer Anne Turyn edited and published Top Stories, an experimental periodical that featured artists and writers including Kathy Acker, Laurie Anderson, Constance DeJong, Jane Dickson, Pati Hill, Jenny Holzer, and Cookie Mueller. Turyn invited contributors to create single issues and allowed near-total freedom, resulting in varied and often boundary-pushing collections of texts, artworks, and collaborations. While Top Stories focused primarily on women contributors, male artists such as Glenn O’Brien, Peter Hujar, and Richard Prince were also included. This new limited-edition collection presents the entire 29-issue run of Top Stories in a two-volume package. The publication comes on the heels of Anne Turyn: Top Stories—a catalogue featuring photographs by Turyn; essays and interviews by Chris Kraus, Constance DeJong, Douglas Eklund, and Adam Weinberg; and a Top Stories catalogue—published by Weiss Berlin in 2020 and shortlisted for that year’s Aperture PhotoBook Award for Photography Catalogue of the Year.
Do you know of a Pratt faculty book published in 2022 that we should add to our list? Please email Jean Hartig at jhartig@pratt.edu.