Rebecca Cooper Geller is an Assistant Professor of Social Studies Education in the Mary Frances Early College of Education at the University of Georgia (go Dawgs). She was previously an Assistant Professor of Secondary Social Studies Education at the University of Wyoming. She obtained her Ph.D. in Education with a focus on Urban Schooling at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and her Bachelor of Arts degree with distinction in Comparative History of Ideas with a minor in Law, Societies, and Justice at the University of Washington (go Dawgs) as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. After her studies at UW, she became a classroom teacher in an Oakland, California public charter school, where she taught for six years at both the elementary and middle school levels.
Rebecca’s scholarship focuses on critical social studies and civic education, teacher learning, and supporting teachers to build classrooms that are democratic and humanizing for marginalized youth. She is interested in understanding how teachers and students navigate, think about, and make sense of politicized topics, contexts, pedagogical methods, and democracy and justice in the fractured, charged national political climate characterizing our time. Her research has been published in Teachers College Record, Social Education, Democracy & Education, and Theory & Research in Social Education.
Outside of her scholarship and teaching, she enjoys spending time reading, traveling, and hanging out with her family and dog.
Curriculum vitae (as of August 2025)
My to-be-read pile:
The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having—or Being Denied—an Abortion, Diana Greene Foster
The Rose Field: The Book of Dust Volume 3, Philip Pullman