Dr. Jonna Perrillo

I am a professor of English Education. My academic training is in both English education and education history methods. I teach courses on young adult literature and English teaching methods for pre-service teachers and graduate seminars on backwards design, secondary-level composition, education and the media, and education history.

My new book, Educating the Enemy: Teaching Nazis and Mexicans in the Cold War Borderlands tells the story of 144 children of Nazi scientists who moved to El Paso, Texas, in 1946 as part of Operation Paperclip. I compare their experiences in El Paso public schools with those of Mexican American students who made up the majority of the city’s public school population. It is a story of racial segregation, school inequity, and a patriotic curriculum that was more inviting to the children of fascists than some American-born citizens; it also reveals how political assimilation has been treated by schools as an easier, more viable project than racial or ethnic assimilation.
My writing has been published in academic journals including the Journal of American History, the History of Education Quarterly, American Quarterly, Research in Teaching English, and English Education. My work has also appeared in the Boston Review, TIME magazine, the Washington Post, and El Paso Matters.

In the summer of 2021, I co-directed a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for Teachers titled “Making Good Reader and Citizens: The History of Literature Instruction in American Schools.” From 2005 to 2011, I directed the West Texas Writing Project, a branch of the National Writing Project and from 2016-2019 I served as the council historian for the National Council of Teachers of English.

Scholarly Interests

Schools, race, and citizenship
The history of literature instruction
Literature and civic virtues
Teachers' Professional Writing and Development
Education Writing and Reporting

Selected Publications

Educating the Enemy: Teaching Nazis and Mexicans in the Cold War Borderlands (University of Chicago Press, 2022).

"At Home on the Range: Cowboy Culture, Indians, and the Assimilation of Enemy Children in the Cold War Borderlands," American Quarterly 71 (December 2019): 945-967.

"Bringing Harlem to the Schools: Langston Hughes’s The First Book of Negroes and Crafting a Juvenile Readership." Ansley Erickson and Ernest Morrell, eds., Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community (Columbia University Press, 2019), 119-137.

“Once Again, Texas’ Board of Education Exposed How Poorly We Teach History,” Washington Post, September 21, 2018.

"Between the School and the Academy: The Struggle to Promote Practitioner-Based Education Research at Columbia University's Lincoln School, 1917-1935." History of Education Quarterly 54 (February 2016): 90-114.

"The Popularization of High School Poetry Instruction, 1920-1940." Research in the Teaching of English (August 2015): 111-118.

Uncivil Rights: Teachers, Unions, and Race in the Battle for School Equity (University of Chicago Press, 2012).