Organized by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics and co-presented with the Creative Writing Program and the Office of Equity & Belonging, with the support of the Provost’s Office and The New School Libraries, the third edition of New School New Books features recent publications by university faculty, centers, and institutes, across all five colleges. Curated around thematic clusters, thirteen authors assemble for a three-part series of readings and exchanges on a range of topics. Arriving from different fields and programs, they demonstrate the interdisciplinary and public-facing nature of New School scholarship.

The readings are divided into three sections: Time, Space, and Worldbuilding (11 am–12:30 pm), Planetary Politics (12:30–2:00 pm), and Telling Stories (2:30–3:30 pm), with topics ranging from political satire and collective organizing to personal narratives, the oral/aural, and interspecies intelligence.

For the second year in a row, we are pleased to present New School New Books in conjunction with the Spitting Image Art Book Fair (March 21–22), a community exhibition and tabling event, with focus on artists’ books, zines, chapbooks, and print ephemera, led by students of Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts and Parsons School of Design. Supported in part by Lang College’s Community Events grant and the Provost’s Investment Fund “Culture of Care” reward and co-presented by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, the fair brings together over twenty student artists and programming inviting prominent faces of New York’s publishing and contemporary art world to engage with The New School community.

Spitting Image 2025 features a roundtable discussion with Rachel Valinsky, Director of Publications at CARA and co-founder of Wendy’s Subway, and Kimi Hanauer, a Brooklyn-based artist, writer, publisher, and facilitator, as well as a lecture by Be Oakley, founder of GenderFail.

As an extension of New School New Books, a newly published broadsheet features the second edition of the Incomplete* Listing of NYC Libraries, Reading Rooms, and Archives. First published by the VLC in 2023, the publication includes an incomplete map of freely accessible reading spaces throughout New York City coupled with roving libraries and open access digital collections, foregrounding libraries as sites of intervention, liberation, and repair.

These publications are also on view in a pop-up library in Starr Foundation Hall, along with a selection of student publications featured in the Spitting Image Art Book Fair. View the full list of authors and their publications via the Libraries’ New School New Books 2025 online guide.

Participants
Michael Cohen, Siddhartha Deb, Pablo Helguera with Noah Fischer, Luis Jaramillo, Theodore Kerr, David T. Little, Romy Opperman, Dominic Pettman, Kristin Reynolds, Kamala Sankaram, Harpreet Sareen, Sara Serpa, and McKenzie Wark.

Hosts
VLC’s Assistant Director of Editorial Initiatives Re’al Christian; Senior Director/Chief Curator Carin Kuoni; and Director of Operations and Budget Adrienne Umeh

Schedule

10–11 am Prelude

10–10:30 am Breakfast
Join us for coffee and croissants, sponsored by the Provost’s Office.

10:30–11 am The Siren: Pablo Helguera, College of Performing Arts, and Noah Fischer
A reading and activation of The Siren, a new political newspaper and “the sanest response to insane times,” created and edited by Pablo Helguera, Noah Fischer, and Coco Fusco.

11–12:30 pm Session 1: Time, Space, and World Building
On time, existence, resistance, primary and secondary worlds.
Host: Carin Kuoni

Kristin Reynolds, Schools of Public Engagement
Radical Food Geographies: Power, Knowledge and Resistance, 2024

Kamala Sankaram, College of Performing Arts
“Musicalizing the World: Dramaturgical Considerations of Non-European Culture in Contemporary Opera,” New Dramaturgies of Contemporary Opera, 2025

David T. Little, College of Performing Arts
“Seeking the Philosopher’s Stone: On the Alchemy of Time in Creative Dramaturgy,” New Dramaturgies of Contemporary Opera, 2025

Dominic Pettman, Eugene Lange College of Liberal Arts
Sad Planets, 2024

12:30–2:00 pm Session 2: Planetary Politics
On collective organizing, social critique, human and nonhuman intelligences.
Host: Adrienne Umeh

Theodore Kerr, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts
We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production, 2022

Harpreet Sareen, Parsons School of Design
“Neither Here Nor There: Botanical (mis)Communication,” C&C ’23: Proceedings of the 15th Conference on Creativity and Cognition, 2023

Michael Cohen, Schools of Public Engagement
Infrastructure Policy and Inequality, 2024

Siddhartha Deb, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts
Twilight Prisoners: The Rise of the Hindu Right and the Fall of India, 2024

1:30–2:30 pm Interlude
Presentation by Spitting Image Art Book Fair.

2:30–3:30 pm Session 3:  Telling Stories
On writing personal narratives, autobiography, and autofiction.
Host: Re’al Christian

Sara Serpa, College of Performing Arts
Encounters and Collisions, 2025

McKenzie Wark, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts
Life Story, 2024

Luis Jaramillo, Schools of Public Engagement
The Witches of El Paso, 2024

Romy Opperman, The New School for Social Research
“Protocols for a Grounding Philosophy,” As for Protocols, 2025

3:30 Finale
A celebratory reception, sponsored by the Provost’s Office.