The intensified political focus on teachers internationally over the last decades has been accompanied by a surge in the academic literature dedicated to the teaching professions in the context of globalisation and Europeanisation. Forming part of the five-year ERC project TeachersCareers, based at Université Catholique de Louvain, the literature review presented in this paper maps this expanding field of scholarship and identifies the multiple strands of literature that help to constitute it. The review is guided by the question how the ‘teacher problem’ since the 1990s has been represented in the Anglophone peer-reviewed academic literature on the teaching professions in the context of globalisation and Europeanisation. Key issues in this respect concern the political processes and governance mechanisms at stake at and across various scales, and the ways in which national trajectories of teacher policies are related to global governance structures and associated evolving normative models of ‘good’ teachers, careers and labour markets. With this entry point, the review identifies and discusses the main strands of literature, as defined by the strands’ distinctive conceptions of globalisation and Europeanisation, the nature of policy and governance, and teachers as professional groups with certain roles and responsibilities in education and societies. Methodologically, the review is ‘configuring’ - as opposed to ‘aggregative’ - in the sense that it seeks to configure, or arrange, the existing literatures and their findings. In addition, the review is systematic in following a series of distinctive stages. In doing so, the review combines hand search of identified key contributions to the literature with searches in the Scopus and ERIC electronic databases. In terms of findings, the review identifies three distinctive strands of literature, including i) a ‘teaching and learning-centric’ literature with a strong focus on teacher education, pedagogy, social and cultural context, levels of professional autonomy, and opportunities for career-long professional development; ii) a neo-institutionalist perspective concerned with cultural patterns of teaching practices and beliefs, and institutional change regarding teachers’ careers; and iii) a critical literature focused on domination and power relations in the global education policy field. The paper forms an indispensable part of this ECER symposium by analysing and identifying patterns, epistemic gains and shortcomings in the state of the art on the teaching professions in the context of Europeanisation and globalization. More generally, the paper constitutes a major contribution to the existing evidence in its undertaking of a structured literature review and synthesis.

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