Julia Foulkes, Author at Public Seminar

The New School

Reckoning with The New School’s Legacies

A comprehensive view reveals entrenched inequities

February 8, 2021 • by Julia Foulkes

_____ What The New School was, is, and could be, has long been contested, often by those who care the most about it. The institution has a convoluted and sometimes contradictory past. It is an amalgamation of parts and histories, a place of stops and starts, sometimes an alternative to traditional ...

The New School

Realizing The New School

A downloadable collection of essays documents lessons from the past as a university looks to its future

September 10, 2020 • by Julia Foulkes and Mark Larrimore

A century later, the experiment has become an institution, one different in almost every way from the one originally proposed. Psychology and the arts quickly redefined what “social research” could be. The Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences and the rise of fascism inspired The New School’s president to establish a ...

The New School

Albert Mayer’s Urban Village: Between The New School and India

A global conversation about using design to foster community

July 16, 2020 • by Julia Foulkes

The New School does not look like most other universities, even those in large cities. It has no college green around which buildings are situated; no common architectural style; no grand monument-like buildings with Latin phrases carved into granite. Instead, it is a disaggregated collection of buildings, most in the ...

History

The New School’s Leading Man

How Alvin Johnson reimagined higher education

June 16, 2020 • by Julia Foulkes and Mark Larrimore

Alvin Johnson is the leading man in the history of The New School. He saved it from financial failure again and again and again; he attracted intellectuals to its faculty, most auspiciously those fleeing fascist Europe in the 1930 and 40s and he persuaded artists such as Thomas Hart Benton ...

Events

Dance+Talk: Paramodernities Live!

Streaming performances with commentary, May 4-9, 2020, at 3pm

May 4, 2020 • by Julia Foulkes

Questions frame the construction of Netta Yerushalmy’s monumental performance project, Paramodernities, which debuted in 2018. And from May 4-9, the questions and conversation will move online, with daily streaming of an installment followed by commentary and chat with noted theorists and artists. Yerushalmy pulled me into the project as the writer and a performer in ...

New York City

For the Love of Strangers

Meditations from the epicenter

April 9, 2020 • by Julia Foulkes

My own favorite anecdote is in the same mode. A friend was wearing beloved red, clown-like shoes on the subway one day and she soon realized that someone sitting across from her was eyeing them. The person then looked up at her and said: “I could be friends with you.” Strangers ...

Film & Performing Arts

Jerome Robbins, Montgomery Clift, and the Origins of “West Side Story”

How a hit Broadway musical was born in New York’s post-war bohemia

March 2, 2020 • by Julia Foulkes

We print this excerpt from Julia L. Foulkes, A Place for Us: “West Side Story” and New York (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016) in celebration of the new Broadway production of West Side Story that opened at The Broadway Theater on February 20, 2020. The choreographer Jerome Robbins and the actor Montgomery ...

Jerome Robbins, Montgomery Clift, and the Origins of “West Side Story”

New York City

Love and Death on the Streets of New York

Why West Side Story is back

February 3, 2020 • by Julia Foulkes

But that may be about to change. A radically new production of West Side Story will open on Broadway next month. And a new West Side Story movie, directed by Steven Spielberg and using locations in Harlem and Paterson, NJ, is to come to the screen later this year. Urban ...

Love and Death on the Streets of New York

The New School

Sex and the New School

The Case of Henry Cowell

November 11, 2019 • by Julia Foulkes

This incident, in particular the impact imprisonment had on his musical output and reputation, overshadows Cowell’s legacy. What had been a career steeped in daring experimentation became one more conventional and careful. Who supported Cowell and who did not -- notably the composer Charles Ives, who abandoned his friend -- ...

The New School

Listening to The New School

Why podcasts?

October 3, 2019 • by Julia Foulkes and Mark Larrimore

At the time we began this project, we also began work on a series of podcasts (available here). Our engagement with New School history already spans multiple genres -- a website, an exhibition, all manner of talks and the current seminar here -- in its effort to invite more and more ...

Multi Media

New Histories

A new three-part podcast on the histories of The New School

September 29, 2019 • by Julia Foulkes and Mark Larrimore

Episode 1: A Place to Go for Adult Values The centenary of The New School offers a chance to look at a university that began as an educational experiment and critique of higher education. Nothing has changed more than the school’s shift away from its original mission as a school devoted ...

Education

Centering Human Relations in Learning

Human Relations Center at the New School: a place for women to come learn and to socialize

April 29, 2019 • by Julia Foulkes

In Spring 1973, the author and women’s rights leader Betty Friedan taught a course on “Women in New York” at The New School. The eight sessions focused on the problems females faced in the city, in work and beyond, and it drew a large crowd. Enrollment consisted of 97 women ...