Maisha Winn

Maisha T. Winn is the Excellence in Learning Graduate School of Education Professor at Stanford University and Faculty Director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning's Equity in Learning Initiative. She serves as Principal Investigator for the Futuring for Equity Lab in the Graduate School of Education. Her scholarship examines how non-dominant youth and communities have developed literate trajectories across a range of historical and contemporary settings within and outside formal schooling. She investigates how communities depicted as under-resourced create their own practices, processes, and institutions, drawing lessons to build more just, collaborative, and equitable futures. An ethnographer by training, Winn engages in historical research focused on social movements in education, with particular emphasis on restorative justice and perspectives in Black education.

Winn earned an MA in Language, Literacy and Culture from Stanford Graduate School of Education in 1998 and a PhD in Language, Literacy and Culture from the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining Stanford Graduate School of Education in 2024, she held the position of Chancellor’s Leadership Professor in the School of Education at the University of California, Davis, where she co-founded and served as faculty director of the Transformative Justice in Education Center. She is the author of key books including Futuring Black Lives: Independent Black Institutions and the Literary Imagination (Vanderbilt University Press, 2025), Justice on Both Sides: Transforming Education through Restorative Justice (Harvard Education Press, 2018), Girl Time: Literacy, Justice, and the School-to-Prison Pipeline (Teachers College Press, 2011), Black Literate Lives: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Routledge, 2009), and Writing in Rhythm: Spoken Word Poetry in Urban Classrooms (Teachers College Press, 2007). Winn has co-edited Restorative Justice in Education: Transforming Teaching and Learning through the Disciplines (Harvard Education Press, 2021), Faith Made Flesh: The Black Child Legacy Campaign for Transformative Justice and Healthy Futures (Cornell University Press, 2023), and Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities (Sage, 2014). Her publications appear in journals such as AERA Open, Daedalus, and the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Winn has been honored as a 2022-23 Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, an American Educational Research Association Fellow and President-Elect, and a member of the National Academy of Education.

Professional Email: mtwinn@stanford.edu