Teaching William Morris, an excellent new essay collection edited by Jason D. Martinek and Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, is in fact more broadly useful to Morris scholars than its title implies. Some of the volume's contributors offer techniques and materials to assist instructors, some make arguments about the significance of teaching Morris, and some have relatively little to say about pedagogy. Yet each essay provides insights that will be of interest to those writing about Morris as well as those planning to incorporate him into their syllabi. Indeed, the book explores the ways in which teaching can take one's research in unexpected and exciting new directions.

In their thoughtful introduction, Martinek and Miller emphasize the difficulty of grappling with a figure whose work straddles so many fields of inquiry, from literature to politics to art and design. They advocate for a more holistic alternative to the “amputative approach” (2) usually taken in classrooms. But reminding us that “all interdisciplinarity begins in disciplinarity” (4), they choose to organize their book into five sections.

The first addresses Morris's complex afterlife via his past and present reception. Elizabeth Helsinger's and Elizabeth Grennan Browning's essays make for a felicitous pairing, as both focus on education in Chicago at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Helsinger ably demonstrates that Morris acted as “a spur to radical pedagogic innovation” (20) at the University of Chicago; Grennan Browning reveals Morris's importance to the reformers Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, who through their social settlement Hull-House hoped to “reinvigorate industrial workers’ lives with meaning” (26). In a charming chapter, John Plotz tells how writing a young-adult novel about the Pre-Raphaelites armed him with new strategies for teaching Morris. Helen Elletson summarizes the initiatives taken by the William Morris Society to appeal to younger students. Finally, KellyAnn Fitzpatrick makes a compelling case for using the work of J. R. R. Tolkien to teach Morris as a fantasy writer and medievalist—acknowledging in the process that, as many of these essays mention, Morris tends not to be an easy sell for undergraduates.

The next section turns to politics. Describing one fruitful way to teach Morris's A Dream of John Ball in the context of nineteenth-century British radicalism, Linda K. Hughes and William M. Meier append a wonderfully detailed syllabus and a selection of writing prompts. Martinek and Miller's favored interdisciplinary approach, it seems, does work well in practice. In a similar vein, Morna O'Neill cannily identifies the Paris Commune as one pedagogical key to “a fuller contextual account of Morris's political and artistic ideals, and the vital points of overlap between them” (99). And David Latham's experience teaching News from Nowhere underlies his stirring meditation on Morris's version of utopia: this dream represents not escapist naïveté but radically transformative desire.

One could perhaps have wished for more diversity of subject matter in the section on literature, in which the first three of five chapters also concentrate on News from Nowhere. All the same, these essays offer impressive methodological variety. Susan David Bernstein, through the lens of a graduate seminar on Victorian objects, argues persuasively that Morris studies and new materialisms are mutually illuminating. Michael Robertson proposes another “alternative discursive tradition” (150) for News from Nowhere that both resonates and contrasts with Bernstein's framework: antimaterialistic simplicity in living, which he connects to simplicity in teaching. Although Deanna K. Kreisel locates the novel in a somewhat more conventional context—a class on literary utopias and dystopias—she takes the refreshingly innovative pedagogical tack of using her students’ frequent boredom with Morris to spark discussion of his book's formal properties. Pamela Bracken, focusing on Morris's poetry, again underscores interdisciplinarity as she showcases ingenious techniques for presenting “The Defence of Guenevere” to students as “a verbal-visual artifact” (176). Lastly, Michelle Weinroth's absorbing chapter harks back to the topic of reception, providing “a critical portrait of Morris's marginality within the canon as a modest prolegomenon to any future teaching of his literary texts” (188).

Similar concerns surface in Imogen Hart's elegant essay, which opens the section on art and design. Remarking on Morris's ambiguous place in the canon, Hart suggests that the difficulties of slotting him into curricula can challenge students’ preconceptions about the definition of art. For James Housefield, Morris sheds light on the social role of designers; linking the Arts and Crafts movement to contemporary examples of craft activism, Housefield taps into one of this collection's central themes as he notes that teaching Morris is vital in today's political climate. And Julie Codell argues convincingly for the importance of highlighting Morris's “revaluation of craft through an application of fine art values” (236)—especially in classrooms where students come from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds.

The fifth and final section deals with digital humanities. Florence Boos's engaging contribution recounts the ways in which she has used online materials to teach (for instance) The Defence of Guenevere and News from Nowhere. She observes that these approaches allow instructors to emphasize the multidisciplinary nature of Morris's work, and she appends a helpful sample assignment. Tony Pinkney, in describing his efforts to build an intellectual community via blog posts and tweets and YouTube videos, reminds us that Morris instruction can reach far beyond the university classroom. Finally, Amanda Golden brings the volume to a satisfying close by using her multimodal composition course to demonstrate how Morris's aesthetics “become a model for students’ engagement with visual art and technology” (275).

It can be challenging, as many of the contributors confirm, to get undergraduates interested in Morris. Very occasionally, these essays slip into an unproductive “kids these days!” mode in response to such resistance. But far more frequently, they contend—with admirable eloquence and rigor—that what Martinek and Miller call Morris's “capacity for critical hope” (7) makes the difficulty of teaching him worthwhile, and more so today than ever. This valuable volume, then, will provide both instruction and inspiration for those who plan to take on the task.