Adam Spanos

I am a postdoctoral teaching fellow in the department of Comparative Literature at USC. My book project studies forms of historical time consciousness in twentieth-century novels and cultural criticism from Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria. I have also published work on postcolonial avant-garde literature and anticolonial internationalism. My essays have appeared in journals such as Alif, Comparative Literature, and The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, as well as in The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature and The Postcolonial Contemporary, edited by Jini Kim Watson and Gary Wilder (Fordham UP, 2018).

I previously held a Harper-Schmidt fellowship at the University of Chicago, where I taught the first-year humanities sequence “Human Being and Citizen.” My priority as a teacher is to help students pose more insightful questions, both of the texts they read and of themselves. I work to empower students by showing them how a good question can start the process of changing the world.