A decade of asking who controls knowledge.

Dr. Hope K. McCoy has spent a decade asking the questions that institutions tend to avoid: who controls knowledge, who gets to study where, and what geopolitical interests shape the architecture of higher education itself. That inquiry runs through everything she does, from the classroom to the archive to the policy table.

She is currently an Assistant Professor and Faculty Director of Global Higher Education at Adelphi University’s Ruth S. Ammon College of Education and Health Sciences, and holds a concurrent appointment as Assistant Professor of Social Sciences at IIT Madras, Zanzibar, in Tanzania. The pairing suits both her intellectual range and her instinct to work in places where the stakes are real. Before these roles, she lectured in International Relations and in the Civic, Liberal, and Global Education program at Stanford University, and held a postdoctoral appointment at the USC Rossier School of Education.

Education is never neutral.

Her 2024 book, From Congo to GONGO: Higher Education, Critical Geopolitics, and the New Red Scare, won the Peter Lang Emerging Scholars Competition in Black Studies, a recognition that reflects both the rigor and the urgency of the argument she is making. In 2022, she contributed a chapter on building virtual communities of practice for equity in education, published by Palgrave Macmillan, a quieter piece of the same larger project.

She is a two-time Fulbright recipient. Her first award, in 2015, took her to Russia. Her second, in 2025, brought her to the British Virgin Islands, where she served as Scholar-in-Residence at H. Lavity Stoutt Community College, becoming only the second Fulbright scholar to hold that appointment. She also held Stanford’s Fellowship to Diversify Teaching and Learning.

What ties it together is consistency of purpose: the belief that education is never neutral, and that understanding who it serves, and who it leaves out, is itself a form of scholarship worth building a career on.