Teaching William Morris

Long before the word “interdisciplinary” entered the landscape of higher education, William Morris embodied that ideal. Teaching William Morris offers a wide array of perspectives on the challenges and the rewards of teaching this Victorian polymath whose ideas and creations remain so powerful today.

A prolific artist, writer, designer, and political activist, the work of William Morris remains remarkably powerful and relevant today. But how do you teach someone like Morris who made significant contributions to several different fields of study? And how, within the exigencies of the modern educational system, can teachers capture the interdisciplinary spirit of this polymath, whose various contributions hang so curiously together? Teaching William Morris gathers together the work of nineteen Morris scholars from a variety of fields, offering a wide array of perspectives on the challenges and the rewards of teaching William Morris. Across the book’s five sections – “Art and Design,” “Literature,” “Political Contexts,” “Pasts and Presents,” and “Digital Humanities” – readers will learn the history of Morris’s place in the modern curriculum, the current state of the field for teaching Morris’s work today, and how this pedagogical effort is reaching beyond the classroom by way of books, museums, and digital resources.