About

Keffrelyn D. Brown (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison) is the Suzanne B. and John L. Adams Endowed Professor of Education and a Distinguished University Teaching Professor of Cultural Studies in Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Texas at Austin. She also holds faculty appointments in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies, the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies, and the Center for Women and Gender Studies. Her research and teaching focus on the sociocultural knowledge in teaching and curriculum, critical multicultural teacher education, and the educational discourses and intellectual thought related to African Americans and their educational experiences in the U.S. She is the co-founder and co-director of the Center for Innovation in Race, Teaching, and Curriculum. Brown has published extensively, including over 50 books, journal articles, and book chapters, and serves on the editorial boards of several peer-reviewed journals. She has received numerous awards and recognitions for her research and teaching, including the Division K Mid-career Award from the American Educational Research Association and the Regent's Outstanding Teaching award from the University of Texas System. Her background includes experience as an elementary and middle school teacher, school administrator, and curriculum developer, which informs her understanding of the everyday challenges of schooling.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Economics
• Finance
• Business
• Sociology
• Actuarial science
• Political Science
• Management
• Microeconomics
• Monetary economics
• Demographic economics
• Demography
• Statistics

Selected publications

• Educators of colour, teaching race, and orienting towards a humanising critical sociocultural knowledge for teaching

  Teachers and Teaching · 2026-02-07

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Centering Black Boys: Theorizing Humanity, Play, and Joy in Contemporary Children's Literature

  Urban Education · 2025-09-16 · 1 citations

  article

  Drawing from theories of humanity, knowledge, play, and representation, this article theorizes the narratives told about Black boys in children's literature from 2002 to 2025. Through a critical content analysis of 18 picture books, the authors examine how Black boys are depicted across stories, emphasizing representations that affirm their full humanity. This study explores how children's literature serves as a site of sociocultural meaning-making. The authors argue that these texts resist dominant tropes and offer portrayals of Black boyhood—rooted in joy, imagination, culture, and community.

  PublisherDOI

• Feeling safe from the storm of anti-Blackness: Black affective networks and the im/possibility of safe classroom spaces in Predominantly White Institutions

  UNC Libraries · 2025-06-11

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Black affective networks form in evanescent moments when two or more Black people in a white space cluster around a Black feeling and other things. This article is a feminist narrative inquiry into Black affective networks in classrooms on the campuses of Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs) in the United States. Authors inhabit dual roles as researchers and study participants in an investigation of affects that percolated in two classrooms, catalyzing the constitution of Black affective networks in those contexts. In the lineage of contemporary Black feminism, authors use beautiful writing as a method with which to narrate stories illustrating the formation of these assemblages. The stories show that these constellations served as locations for the production of counter-hegemonic knowledge of Blackness—that is, perceptual spaces where knowledge of Blackness not as abject but rather as a wellspring of Black excitement, pride, love, and joy was transacted. Ergo, Black affective networks provided Black faculty and students with pathways for temporary escape from the anti-Black violence built into PWIs. Authors pivot from this inquiry on the im/possibility of classrooms in PWIs functioning as safe spaces for Black faculty and students to echo calls for a turn to Black affect theory and to trouble diversity and inclusion discourses in US higher education.

  PublisherDOI

• Glancing back and looking forward: The role of education policy in creating pathways to the workforce for Teachers of Color and Indigenous Teachers

  Education Policy Analysis Archives · 2024-09-17 · 8 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The Handbook of Research on Teachers of Color and Indigenous Teachers charts the landscape of the educator diversity research base by focusing on 11 domains of inquiry. Policy, one of the domains of inquiry in the Handbook, is instrumental for advancing educator diversity. This paper is anchored in the lessons from the policy domain, and extends this scholarship by briefly synthesizing the historical origins of educator diversity policies, and examining present-day manifestations of these efforts in the sociopolitical context of state and federal level policy trends. The manuscript concludes with a set of policy recommendations.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A Culturally Responsive School Leadership Approach to Developing Equity-Centered Principals: Considerations for Principal Pipelines

  2023-07-01 · 20 citations

  reportOpen access

  How could school districts construct principal pipelines that produce school leaders who advance equity in education? A team of scholars offers ideas.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Section Introduction: Policy.

  2022-10-02

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Feeling safe from the storm of anti-Blackness: Black affective networks and the im/possibility of safe classroom spaces in Predominantly White Institutions

  Curriculum Inquiry · 2021-01-01 · 22 citations

  articleSenior author

  Black affective networks form in evanescent moments when two or more Black people in a white space cluster around a Black feeling and other things. This article is a feminist narrative inquiry into Black affective networks in classrooms on the campuses of Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs) in the United States. Authors inhabit dual roles as researchers and study participants in an investigation of affects that percolated in two classrooms, catalyzing the constitution of Black affective networks in those contexts. In the lineage of contemporary Black feminism, authors use beautiful writing as a method with which to narrate stories illustrating the formation of these assemblages. The stories show that these constellations served as locations for the production of counter-hegemonic knowledge of Blackness—that is, perceptual spaces where knowledge of Blackness not as abject but rather as a wellspring of Black excitement, pride, love, and joy was transacted. Ergo, Black affective networks provided Black faculty and students with pathways for temporary escape from the anti-Black violence built into PWIs. Authors pivot from this inquiry on the im/possibility of classrooms in PWIs functioning as safe spaces for Black faculty and students to echo calls for a turn to Black affect theory and to trouble diversity and inclusion discourses in US higher education.

  PublisherDOI

• The Limits of Justice-Informed Research and Teaching in the Presence of Antiblackness and Black Suffering: Surplus of Transformation or (Un)Just Traumatic Returns?

  Qualitative Inquiry · 2021-07-28 · 8 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In this conceptual article, I examine the turn of justice-oriented research and teaching from transformative to traumatic and its relationship to antiblackness. I consider the affordances and limits of research and teaching that makes antiblackness visible while simultaneously citing potentially traumatizing portraits of Black suffering. Drawing from critical multicultural education and social justice scholarship, alongside Black intellectual thought in literary studies, visual studies, Eastern philosophy, and participatory and ethnographic research, I ask whether and how researchers should engage justice-informed research and teaching. I offer insights to consider when seeking either to capture antiblack injustice or to share it as curriculum.

  PublisherDOI

• What Do Black Students Need? Exploring Perspectives of Black Writers Writing Outside of Educational Research

  Equity & Excellence in Education · 2021-01-02 · 10 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  What does it mean to educate the Black student? How do education stakeholders committed to Black students and communities understand the role of teaching and teachers to help students meet education goals? In this analytical article, inspired by multiple traditions in Black intellectual thought, I explore how Black writers who write outside of education research discuss the teachers and teaching Black students need. I examine three pieces published between the mid-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois’, commencement speech, “Diuturni Silenti,” writer and activist James Baldwin’s speech and essay, “A Talk to Teachers,” and education journalist Melinda D. Anderson’s, “Becoming a Teacher.” I argue that because these authors speak from a different standpoint than academic research traditionally engages, they present a unique historic and contemporary vision of teachers and teaching for Black students.

  PublisherDOI

• Antiblackness, Black Joy, and Embracing a Humanizing Critical Sociocultural Knowledge (HCSK) for Teaching: Lessons From Schooling in the Time of COVID-19

  Multicultural Perspectives · 2021-07-03 · 6 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In this critical reflective analysis, we explore the nature of schooling for Black children and youth before and during the COVID-19 pandemic and envision its transformative possibilities. We draw from Black intellectual thought around antiblackness, Black joy, and Brown?s humanizing critical sociocultural knowledge to interrogate our own pandemic case as two Black education scholars working from home while also supervising the virtual schooling of our two Black children from March 2020?March 2021. While no lessons learned justify the pain of COVID-19, we share key insights and wisdom we gained during our quarantine that ask us to re-imagine the futures of schooling for Black students.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• W. V. Harlow

  18 shared

• Cristian Ioan Tiu

  University at Buffalo, State University of New York

  15 shared

• Bruno Solnik

  9 shared

• Bernard S. Black

  Medical College of Wisconsin

  9 shared

• Sanjai Bhagat

  University of Colorado Boulder

  9 shared

• Stiinjey Kogrlman

  CFA Institute

  9 shared

• Margargt Blair

  CFA Institute

  9 shared

• Brookiags Iastitutio

  Financial Research (Hungary)

  9 shared

Labs

• Center for Innovation in Race, Teaching, and CurriculumPI

Awards & honors

• Division K Mid-career Award from the American Educational Re…
• Kappa Delta Pi/Division K Early Career Research Award from A…
• Regent's Outstanding Teaching award, The University of Texas…
• Induction in the Provost's Teaching Fellows program at UT Au…
• Induction in the Academy of Distinguished Teaching at UT Aus…