When I tell people that I am from Kansas, they are usually surprised. How did I end up in a career focused on comparative and international education, given where I’m from?
In response, I always point to my time as an English major at K-State.
My interest in understanding the human experience within different social, cultural, economic, political, and historical contexts flourished there. On my bookshelf, I still have the books I read when I enrolled twice in ENGL 580 “Selected World Literature,” the first time with a focus on Chinese and Vietnamese literature (with Michele Janette) and the second time with a focus on Indian and Pakistani literature (with Dean Hall). Books like Lao She’s Rickshaw Boy and Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve sparked my early interest in understanding how industry and labor shape people’s livelihoods in unequal ways. This understanding informed my educational approach when I moved to the Dominican Republic (2012-2017) to support a youth workforce development program amidst the inequalities of the tourism industry, a topic I returned to years later for my dissertation research (2021-2022).
Molly teaching 50 teachers and university students in the Dominican Republic at the “Imagining English” conference in August 2025, sponsored by a grant from the U.S. Department of State for Exchange Alumni.
As I reflected on my experiences as an English major at K-State, I revisited some of the essays I wrote more than 15 years ago. I was amazed to see how the seeds for my current work were evident across the pages.
In my archived emails, I found a paper I wrote for Deborah Murray’s ENGL 362 “British Survey II,” which I had titled “Imperialism and Colonialism: Forming a Literary Identity through Language.” Drawing on the writings of Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o, Kamau Brathwaite, Salman Rushdie, and Louise Bennett, among others, I discussed the effects of the English language’s hegemony but also how the standard variety was subverted in former British colonies to generate new literature, cultural representations, and identities. Another paper, from Tim Dayton’s ENGL 650 class “20th Century American Literature,” used anthropological and sociological lenses to analyze the work of Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright, as well as their differing approaches to representing Black experiences.
Now, as an assistant professor of Social Foundations of Education at the University of South Florida, my research and teaching continue to engage with these topics and perspectives, something I had never envisioned when I first began working in the field of education.
This week, I began teaching a new module in my undergraduate course on “Schools and Society.” After several weeks of discussing the competing purposes of schooling, we are now examining the enduring debates about liberal arts and vocationalism in education. Should schools, including universities, focus on career readiness and work-related skills development? Or should they facilitate both depth and breadth of knowledge, allowing students to interrogate and transform the human experience?
My English classes at K-State certainly prepared me for both, but it has been the mindset shifts made possible through a humanities education that have genuinely changed my trajectory.
I hope that in 10-15 years, my current students will reflect on their class essays in similar ways and that, in the meantime, they will apply what they learn now to defend the public purposes of education
— Molly Hamm-Rodriguez (BA ’10)
Molly is Assistant Professor of Social Foundations of Education at the University of South Florida. She specializes in the anthropology of education and comparative and international education. Her research examines the intersection of language and social identities with youth livelihoods in the Caribbean and among multilingual and immigrant students in the United States. Her passion for reading and writing shaped her desire to become a qualitative researcher, studying how young people use language to tell their stories. After graduating from K-State, she earned an M.A. in International Educational Development from Teachers College, Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Educational Equity and Cultural Diversity from the University of Colorado Boulder.
K-State English 