Photo: Alton Christensen

Henry Giroux

Cultural Critic

Henry Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship in the English and Cultural Studies Department at McMaster University and is a distinguished visiting scholar at Ryerson University, both in Canada.

Giroux’s work centers around cultural studies, youth, democratic theory, public education and the politics of higher education. Giroux is familiar with many of those topics due to his decades of experience teaching America’s youth, beginning as a high school history teacher in Barrington, RI, in 1968 and working his way through teaching jobs at prestigious institutions such as Boston University, Tufts, Northeastern University and Penn State University.

Giroux has written over 55 books, including: On Critical Pedagogy (2011), Twilight of the Social: Resurgent Publics in the Age of Disposability (2012), Disposable Youth: Racialized Memories and the Culture of Cruelty (2012), Youth in Revolt: Reclaiming a Democratic Future (2013) and The Educational Deficit and the War on Youth (2013).

His two most recent books are Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education which will be published in March 2014 and The Violence of Organized Forgetting: Thinking Beyond America’s Disimagination Machine which will be released the following year.

Giroux is the founder of Truthout’s Public Intellectual Project and is a member of its board of directors. In 2012, he was named one of the top public intellectuals changing the way the world thinks by the Toronto Star. Born to a working class family in Rhode Island, Giroux received his doctorate from Carnegie Mellon in 1977. Today he lives with his wife, Dr. Susan Searls Giroux, in Ontario, Canada.