Dean Emerita and Professor of the Arts Carol Becker is releasing her new book, George’s Daughter, with publisher Spuyten Duyvil in February/March 2025.
The book is both memoir and essay, the story of a daughter growing up with a beloved but domineering father in post-World War II Brooklyn, and the Crown Heights neighborhood where survivors from the concentration camps work to build new lives. In the years that follow, racial and religious discrimination again come to the fore, and the daughter finds herself at increasing odds with a father out of touch. When he disapproves of her new romantic partner, the rupture threatens to ruin the family forever.
In early praise, filmmaker and Associate Professor of Professional Practice Ramin Bahrani (Academy Award-nominee for The White Tiger) called the book, “a tender, deeply nuanced portrayal of a father and daughter’s evolving relationship,” and author Brad Evans (Director of the Centre for the Study of Violence, University of Bath) celebrated Becker’s “journey into the most difficult and human of all possible actions, the act of forgiveness.”
The new book is a companion piece to Becker’s debut memoir/essay, Losing Helen (Red Hen Press, 2016), in which she analyzed another side of the daughter-parent relationship, and grappled with the impending loss of her dear mother.
Becker is a widely published author and lecturer who served 16 years as Dean of the School of the Arts, and remains an active professor and community leader. Her other works include The Invisible Drama: Women and the Anxiety of Change; The Subversive Imagination: Artists, Society and Social Responsibility; Zones of Contention: Essays on Art, Institutions, Gender, and Anxiety; Surpassing the Spectacle: Global Transformations and the Changing Politics of Art; and Thinking in Place: Art, Action, and Cultural Production.
George’s Daughter is available for pre-order here.
