It Takes a Village

How often do professors invite students to help shape their book-in-progress? Not every day — but at Pitzer, it happens. An associate professor of English and world literature is doing just that. As Pitzer’s 2025-26 scholar in residence, Amanda Lagji is teaching a spring course on counterinsurgency, in which students don’t just study texts—they are taking an active part in collaborating on her current book project.

Titled “Counterinsurgency and the Weaponization of Time: Insecure Futures in Contemporary Global Fiction,” Lagji’s book examines how novels and stories grapple with terrorism through four major counter-terrorism frameworks. In the classroom, students read, discuss, and offer feedback on draft chapters as they work on drawing connections across literature, history and politics. Together, they are working with these fields of study in order to track the presence of counterinsurgency in colonial spaces.

It’s a hands-on approach that turns learning into a shared creative process. Students aren’t just learning new and unfamiliar texts; they’re getting a chance to take part in the creation of one.