PENN STATE HBG
MIDDLETOWN, PA 17057
Biography
Hannah Spector’s scholarly interests involve the interplay between politics, ethics, and education. Her research is published in the World Yearbook of Education (book series), the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education, and in journals such as Curriculum Inquiry, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, and Studies in Philosophy and Education. She co-edited a special journal issue of Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies (2017, with R. Lake and T. Kress) on Maxine Greene and the Pedagogy of Social Imagination: An Intellectual Genealogy, which is republished as a book with Routledge (2018). Her 2023 monograph book, In Search of Responsibility as Education is published with Routledge's Studies in Curriculum Theory Series.
Hannah was appointed Visiting Professor at the University of Vienna and was a visiting scholar with the Vienna Anthropocene Network in May/June 2023. Currently, she is working on a co-edited book project on the political theory of Hannah Arendt.
Hannah Spector has received several awards for her research including the Early Career Award from the American Educational Research Association’s SIG Critical Issues in Curriculum and Cultural Studies (2019) and the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies Dissertation Award (2014). Her article “Fukushima Daiichi: A never-ending story of pain or outrage?” received the Outstanding Paper Award in Canadian Curriculum Studies (2013) and the Graduate Student Award from the American Educational Research Association’s SIG Critical Issues in Curriculum and Cultural Studies (2013). She is also a recipient of the Penn State Harrisburg Excellence in Teaching Award (2022) and the college's Faculty Diversity Award (2020).
Before working in higher education, Hannah was a high school English teacher.
Research Interests
- Curriculum theory
- Hannah Arendt
- Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism
- Anthropocene
Publications
Jones, K. B., Spector, H., Lederman, S. (Eds.). (forthcoming). The Elgar companion to Hannah Arendt. Edward Elgar Publishing.
Spector, H. (in press). Common sense matters: Reply to Janzen, Sonu, Myrebøe’s reviews of In search of responsibility as education. Studies in Philosophy and Education.
Spector, H. (2023). Curriculum Studies in the time of the Anthropocene. Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies, 15(2), 1-14.
Spector, H. (2023). In search of responsibility as education: Traversing banal and radical terrains. New York, NY: Routledge.
Spector, H. (2022). Rejoinder to the “theorycide” at the center of curriculum studies. Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal for the Historiography of Education. 12(2), 162-165.
Spector, H. (2022). The imperial nationalism of human rights and genocide education laws: Cases from the United States. In D. Trohler, N. Piattoeva, & W. F. Pinar (Eds.), World Yearbook of Education 2022: Education, Schooling and the Global Universalization of Nationalism. (pp. 235-250). London, UK: Routledge. ISBN: 0367684934
Spector, H. (2021). The significance of sense in the time of plagues: Curricular responsiveness to the Covid-19 crisis. Prospects: Comparative Journal of Curriculum, Learning and Assessment. doi: 10.1007/s11125-021-09550-0
Spector, H. (2020). Trends and typologies of cosmopolitanism in education. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. New York: Oxford University Press.
Spector, H and Price, T. (2020). As the virtual dust settles: Looking back at and beyond AAACS 2020. Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies, 14(1), 1-10.
Spector, H. (2020). Homage to the place(lessness) of poetry and the poetic life of Carl Leggo. Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 17(2), 34-37.
Spector, H. (2018). Bureaucratization, education, and the meanings of responsibility. Curriculum Inquiry, 48(5), 503-520. doi:10.1080/03626784.2018.1547615
Spector, H., Lake, R., and Kress, T. (2017). [Introduction]. Maxine Greene and the pedagogy of social imagination: An intellectual genealogy. Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 39(1), 1-6. doi:10.1080/10714413.2017.1262150
Spector, H. (2017). Cultivating the ethical imagination in education: Perspectives from three public intellectuals. Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 39(1), 39-59. doi:10.1080/10714413.2017.1262157
Spector, H. (2017). The cosmopolitan subject and the question of cultural identity: The case of “Crime and Punishment.” Crime, Media, Culture, 13(1), 21-40. doi:10.1177/1741659016634813
Spector, H. (2016). Hannah Arendt, education, and the question of totalitarianism. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 37(1), 89-101. doi:10.1080/01596306.2014.927113
Spector, H. (2015). The great unescape: Three Mile Island, Fukushima, and beyond. Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 37(4), 271-288. doi:10.1080/10714413.2015.1065613
Spector, H. (2015). The who and the what of educational cosmopolitanism. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 34(4), 423-440. doi:10.1007/s11217-014-9441-4
Spector, H. (2012). Fukushima Daiichi: A never-ending story of pain or outrage? Transnational Curriculum Inquiry, 9(1), 80-97.
Spector, H. (2012). Ethical learning in an age of standardization. English Quarterly, 43(3-4), 125-129.
Spector, H. (2011). The cosmopolitan imagination in Philip Roth’s “Eli, the fanatic.” Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 27(3), 224-238.
Spector, H. (2011). The question of cosmopolitanism. Education Review, 14(2), 1-14.
Education
Ph.D. (University of British Columbia; Vancouver, Canada)
M.F.A. (Emerson College; Boston, MA)
B.A. (University of Florida; Gainesville, FL)