Mahasan Chaney

Mahasan Chaney is an Assistant Professor of Education at Brown University. She earned a Ph.D. in Education from the University of California, Berkeley in 2019, an M.S. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2011, and a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2010. Following her Ph.D., she served as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Brown from 2019 to 2021, affiliated with the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America and the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Prior to academia, Chaney worked as a restorative justice coordinator at Berkeley High School. She holds affiliations with Brown's Annenberg Institute for School Reform, Cogut Institute for the Humanities, and Africana Studies Department, and is a member of the History of Education Society, American Educational Research Association, and Organization of American Historians.

Chaney's scholarship centers on post-civil rights era education history, critical policy studies, and Black education, particularly the racial politics of education, politics of school punishment, and ideologies and discourses of federal education reform from the Great Society through the neoliberal era. Her first book project, Disciplining Opportunity: Antiblack Paternalism and Making School Punishment, offers an intellectual and cultural history of how opportunity discourses in policy have fostered punitive school discipline, perpetuating inequality and the school-to-prison pipeline for Black students. Notable publications include "Disciplining Our Own: Politicizing the Image of the Strict Black Principals, 1970-1985" (Journal of Urban History, 2023), "Undisciplining school discipline research: Refusing the racial paternalism to punishment pipeline" in New Approaches to Inequality Research with Youth (Routledge, 2023), and "‘Black crisis’ and the ‘likely’ privatization of public education in New Orleans and Liberia" (Critical Studies in Education, 2019). She has received the National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship (2019-2020), Cogut Faculty Fellowship (2024), William T. Grant Foundation Writing Fellowship (2021), UC Berkeley Dissertation-Year Fellowship (2018), and Chancellor’s Fellowship (2012-2016).

Professional Email: mahasan_chaney@brown.edu