Special Issue: Teaching with Letters

Edited journal issue, 2025

Throughout history, letters—both real-life and fictional—have served as spaces for teaching and learning. This special issue, “Teaching with Letters,” brings together five articles that explore how letters function as pedagogical spaces across temporal, geographical, cultural, and social distances.The articles trace a chronological arc spanning nearly two millennia of epistolary pedagogy. Ef-frosyni Tsakou examines Alciphron’s Letters of Courtesans(second or third century AD), reveal-ing how ancient fictional letters served as both erotic and rhetorical education. Dóra Janczer Csikós explores how Mary Hays’snovel The Victim of Prejudice(1799) subverted conventional maternal instruction. T. K. Dalton studies letters from an 1865 penmanship contest for Union veterans who relearned writing with their left hands after combat injuries, offering insights into disability iden-tity and the pedagogical affordances of letter writing. Rowa Nabil examines Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (1970), showing how Jackson transformed the carceral space into a pedagogical space. Finally, McKenzie Wood brings us to the present withprison pen-pal exchanges usedin a criminal justicegraduatecourse, where letters bring theoretical concepts into dialogue with the lived experiences of incarcerated individuals.What emerges across these studies is the epistolary form’s capacity to create encounters that mat-ter—spaces where pedagogy becomes inseparable from care, recognition, and transformation.