Teaching Politically - by May Hawas & Bruce Robbins

Book Synopsis

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

Review Quotes

"Teaching Politically addresses a pair of important and resonant issues in universities in the U.S. and elsewhere: how one teaches and learns under political pressure and surveillance, and how one talks about politics in literary and cultural classrooms. The book's attention to a range of sites around the world admirably pushes the conversation beyond the U.S. context."---Christopher Newfield, author of The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them

"At a moment when the politics of the university classroom is undergoing blistering attacks from the right, this smart and thoughtful collection investigates what is in fact political about teaching. What is authority? Who are the university's publics? What is the teacher's responsibility? This volume is refreshing and unusual in its global reach, addressing pedagogy and politics in Egypt, Greece, and Palestine, as well as the U.S. and Australia."---Caroline Levine, author of The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis

About the Author

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).