Rate My Professor Panayota Gounari

Panayota Gounari is a Professor and Department Chair in the Department of Applied Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she has been on the faculty since 2004. She earned her PhD in Language and Literacy Education from Pennsylvania State University, an MA in Applied Linguistics from the University of Massachusetts Boston, and a BA in Greek Philology/Linguistics from the National University of Athens, Greece. Gounari's research interests encompass the politics of language, neoliberal discourses, authoritarian discourses and critical theory, critical pedagogy, bilingualism, and language ideologies. Her work investigates how linguistic practices and discourses perpetuate power structures, particularly in educational, political, and social arenas marked by austerity, populism, and authoritarianism.

Gounari maintains a prolific publication record, including the monograph From Twitter to Capitol Hill: Far-Right Authoritarian Populist Discourses, Social Media and Critical Pedagogy (Brill, 2022). Key publications also feature 'Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!': Teaching in Authoritarian Times in Disrupting Hate: Teacher Activists, Democracy and Pedagogies of Disruption (Routledge, 2021); Teaching and Learning Language in Dangerous Times, introduction to the special issue on Rethinking Critical Pedagogy in L2 Teaching and Learning (L2 Journal, 2020); Education in the Trump era: Activism as critical public pedagogy (International Journal of Critical Media Studies, 2019); Authoritarianism, discourse and social media: Trump as the 'American agitator' in Critical Theory and Authoritarian Populism (University of Westminster Press, 2018); The Necropolitics of Austerity: Discursive Constructions and Material Consequences in the Greek Context (Fast Capitalism, 2016); Neoliberalism as Social Necrophilia in Reclaiming the Sane Society (Springer, 2014); and co-authored volumes Hegemony of English (Routledge, 2015) and Globalization of Racism (Routledge, 2015). She co-edited A Reader of Critical Pedagogy (Gutenberg, 2010). In 2022, Gounari co-led the five-year, $2.9 million CREATE program grant to train 120 teachers, emphasizing BIPOC bilingual educators, for English learners across eight Greater Boston districts. She teaches courses including Foundations of Bilingual/Multicultural Education, Psycholinguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, Historical Foundations and Contemporary Issues in Critical Pedagogy, and Language Policy.