Teaching Politically: Global Perspectives on Pedagogy and Autonomy

Culture is inextricable from politics. This includes the politics of who we are, as teachers, intellectuals, writers, cultural workers, and students, and what we want to bring to and take from the site of instruction. It also includes the politics of who we want to be, as citizens, professionals, and active contributors to our communities and to the world in general, and what we can be, realistically, in the particular contexts in which we live.

Teaching Politically addresses some of the political constraints that shape our pedagogical spaces, especially in the teaching of literature. The book brings together a global group of academics, activists, public intellectuals, poets, and novelists to examine the way politics manifest pedagogically, and how a commitment to educating manifests politically, in and beyond the classroom. At the heart of the discussion is how political and professional paradigms chafe against, intersect with, or otherwise become inseparable from each other in any vocation that attempts to educate: from writing, journalism, and public speaking to art, activism, and medicine.

Contributors: Dimitris Christopoulos, Dimitri Dimoulis, Khaled Fahmy, Rishi Goyal, May Hawas, Bonnie Honig, Mona Kareem, Benjamin Mangrum, Nora Parr, Bruce Robbins, Ahdaf Soueif, Omid Tofighian, Elahe Zivardar

May Hawas (Edited By)
May Hawas is Associate Professor of World Literature at Cambridge University, and Valerie Eliot Fellow of English at Newnham College. She is the author of Politicising World Literature: Egypt, Between Pedagogy and Politics (Routledge 2019) and editor of The Diaries of Waguih Ghali (American University in Cairo Press, 2 vols. 2017-2018).

Bruce Robbins (Edited By)
Bruce Robbins is Old Dominion Foundation Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. His most recent books are Atrocity: A Literary History (Stanford, 2025) and Criticism and Politics: A Polemical Introduction (Stanford, 2022).