Gil Bittner Archives - Public Seminar

Interviews

Minigolf, Watercolors, and Other Opportunities for “Doing Reproductive Justice Queerly”

An interview with Carly Thomsen about her forthcoming book, Reproductive Justice, Queerly, out this August

June 30, 2026 • by Gil Bittner and Carly Thomsen

In her forthcoming book Reproductive Justice, Queerly (University of California Press, 2026), Carly Thomsen, a feminist and queer studies scholar, looks at how language deployed in the name of queerness and reproductive justice can end up reinforcing the very structures it is meant to challenge. She warns of “conservative outcomes” ...

When The New School Tried to Sell the Orozco Room

On the institutional amnesia that enables universities to treat artworks as fungible assets

June 16, 2026 • by Gil Bittner

Art has always been treated as an investment. The Italian Renaissance was bankrolled by patrons wishing to glorify God—and their own families and administrations. Today, blue-chip art buyers park their assets in storage lockers in tax-friendly free ports, openly treating art as capital rather than culture. Yet it feels different ...

Did You Raise Something Monstrous?

In Night Night Fawn, Jordy Rosenberg turns a mother’s opioid-fueled narration into a study of gender, nationalism, and ideological inheritance

April 21, 2026 • by Gil Bittner

Jordy Rosenberg’s new novel, Night Night Fawn (One World, 2026), is narrated by Barbara Rosenberg, a dying Manhattan mother delivering a torrent of OxyContin-fueled recollections about her life and her estranged trans child, who now goes by “J.” The names are not subtle. Rosenberg’s second novel is a radical form ...

Gil Bittner