Eirik Steinhoff teaches and co-teaches interdisciplinary programs with titles like “How to do things with words,” “Imperialisms,” “Forensics,” “A New Middle East,” “Literary Arts Toolkit,” “Words/Woods,” and “Gateways for Incarcerated Youth” at The Evergreen State College, where he has been a Visiting Member of the Faculty since 2013.
He has also taught courses on Shakespeare, Early Modern Poetry, critical theory, rhetoric, poetry, and poetics at the University of Chicago (where he got his Ph.D. in English), Bard College (where he got his B.A.), and Mills College.
In the early 21st century he was the editor of Chicago Review, and in 2009 his translations from Petrarch’s Rime Sparse appeared as Fourteen Sonnets from Albion Books (San Francisco).
In 2010 he taught at Green Haven Correctional Facility in NY state under the auspices of the Bard Prison Initiative, and in 2014 he co-facilitated a seminar with faculty at Al-Quds University in Palestine.
He co-edits Black Box: A Record of the Catastrophe, and he works with students and teachers behind bars in Washington state under the auspices of the Black Prisoner Caucus’s T.E.A.C.H. program (“Taking Education and Creating History”).
The bulk of his study in the classroom and beyond revolves around two questions: “What needs to be the case for things to be otherwise?,” and “How do we make our knowledge common?”