Bryan M. J. Brayboy

Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy (Lumbee), the Carlos Montezuma Professor and Dean of the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University. He is Northwestern's first Native American dean. Brayboy studies how Indigenous people learn, teach, and see themselves within larger systems of power — work that has been recognized and cited by scholars around the world.

An anthropologist of education, Brayboy is well known for his rich theoretical grounding and rigorous research methods. His most influential scholarship is Tribal Critical Race Theory, or TribalCrit, a groundbreaking framework he developed in 2005 that examines how race, power, and Indigenous tribal sovereignty intersect. In 2023, Brayboy received the George and Louise Spindler Award from the Council on Anthropology and Education for a lifetime of work shaping the educational anthropology field, K-12 schools, and higher education. He co-authored the study “Ethnographic Methods: Training Norms and Practices and the Future of American Anthropology," which was the most-read article of 2024 in American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association.

A member of the National Academy of Education and a fellow of the American Educational Research Association — where he was elected to the Council and Executive Board in 2024 — Brayboy is the author of more than 110 scholarly works, including 10 edited or authored volumes, articles, book chapters, and policy briefs for the Department of Education, the National Science Foundation, and the National Academy of Sciences.

Over the course of his career, he and his team have prepared more than 165 Native teachers to work in American Indian communities and mentored 43 American Indian Ph.D. recipients.

Brayboy earned his B.A. in Political Science from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and an M.S. in Intercultural Communication and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.