Considerations of strategies and experiences teaching under the current spate of laws that are making the classroom into a space of surveillance, danger, threat. Emotional states, states as government entities, states of being—all impact our work as pedagogues—of the eighteenth century or anything else. In particular, where proposed (and soon to pass) laws seek to silence teaching about race and gender specifically, the term “classical liberal arts” treats the eighteenth century as a ’safe space’ of Enlightenment tradition--running up against current efforts to responsibly ‘decolonize’ or remake the “eighteenth century” as some of us received it.

SHAW 46.1 (June 2026): SHAW AND IRELAND