Christopher Kirchgasler

Christopher (Chris) Kirchgasler is an Assistant Professor of Curriculum & Global Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research explores how the intersections of science, technology, and coloniality organize education research, policy, and reform, particularly in terms of how they produce differences and exclusions. He is affiliated with the African Studies Program and the Holtz Center for Science & Technology Studies (STS).

His work pursues two interrelated dimensions. First, he studies global trends in education, such as the rise of international student assessments, teacher observation systems, and low-fee, for-profit schools. Second, he historicizes the objects of education reform, examining how psychological qualities like ‘curiosity’ and ‘grit’ and curricular design principles like ‘development’ and ‘efficiency’ became central to modern schooling. Both dimensions unearth colonial residues in presumptions about the ‘nature’ of children, learning, and progress that unintentionally generate differences that exclude.

His work has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals, including the American Educational Research Journal, Comparative Education, Critical Studies in Education, and Teachers College Record. He is co-editor of the forthcoming Bloomsbury Handbook of Foucault and Education: Exploring Perspectives and Practices (Bloomsbury, 2026) and co-edited A Political Sociology of Educational Knowledge: Studies of Exclusion and Difference (Routledge, 2017).

Dr. Kirchgasler teaches courses on critical, postfoundational, and STS approaches to educational issues at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. Prior to joining the department, he was an Assistant Professor of Curriculum Studies at the University of Kansas. He previously taught in an East Boston public charter school and at a secondary school in Tougué, Guinea as a Peace Corps Volunteer.

He welcomes inquiries from prospective graduate students interested in pursuing STS, postcolonial, and postfoundational approaches to curriculum and global studies.