T. Elon Dancy II

T. Elon Dancy II is a Professor in the Department of Educational Foundations, Organizations, and Policy. He holds affiliate faculty appointments in Africana Studies and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. Dr. Dancy served a term as the Pitt School of Education’s associate dean for equity and justice, collaboratively establishing the School’s signature initiatives, study groups, and faculty pedagogy workshops. While associate dean, he co-chaired the School’s three-year Justice Collective, including designing a Black educational studies focus in the Pitt School of Education, which diversified the faculty and expanded the School’s curriculum.

Dr. Dancy served as the third Helen S. Faison Endowed Chair and Executive Director of the Center for Urban Education (CUE) in the University of Pittsburgh School of Education. In this role, he operated as the center’s chief research scientist, leading the center’s scholarly agenda and synergizing collaborations around shared inquiry. Dr. Dancy’s projects were supported by collaborative local and national relationships and successful grantsmanship including over five million dollars in funding at the University of Pittsburgh for his scholarly projects from several foundations and agencies including the Spencer Foundation, National Science Foundation, Heinz Endowments, Mellon Foundation, Grable Foundation, and the McElhattan Foundation.

During his tenure, which was the longest in the center’s history, he sought to anchor CUE’s scholarly and service projects within Black and Indigenous knowledge traditions, political education, and collaborative, community-based literacies. He led, established, or co-founded signature programs and initiatives including, but not limited to: the Heinz Fellows Program, Practices of Freedom, MathUp Connections, The High-Impact Retired Teachers Project, The Educators Assembly, the Hill District Community Living Room Series, and he launched a series of professional development experiences with the Pitt Hillman Library’s August Wilson Archives–all of which served teachers and students in the Pittsburgh Public School District and districts around Greater Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania. Under Dr. Dancy’s leadership, the Center hosted many local and national convenings on topics of urgency affecting urban education, including school-prison nexus, Black education histories, and several panels and study groups that underscored the relationship between urban education and collective freedom praxis. Under his leadership, the Center housed notable journals in the education field including Educational Researcher and Negro Educational Review.

Prior to joining the University of Pittsburgh faculty, Dr. Dancy was the inaugural associate dean for community engagement and academic inclusion in the Jeannine Rainbolt College of Education at the University of Oklahoma. This position made him the first Black associate dean in the School of Education’s 93-year history. According to university historic records, Dr. Dancy was the first Black person both tenured and promoted to full professor for the study of higher education administration in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies in 2016. During his tenure, Dr. Dancy served as a Provost Fellow, conducting research and collaborative programming projects related to Black student outcomes across academic fields. In recognition of his profound institutional contributions, the OU School of Education established the T. Elon Dancy II Graduate Student Scholarship in Adult and Higher Education in 2016 upon receipt of a philanthropic donation from one of his former graduate students.

Dr. Dancy’s major fields of interest are Black intellectual thought; boys, men and masculinities; structural oppression, and related schooling and higher education issues. This scholarly agenda largely draws upon Black knowledge traditions and critical theories to examine education settings as sites of struggle and aspiration, with a focus on Black American populations. He is highly regarded for his studies of Black masculinity and patriarchy in postsecondary contexts, antiBlackness in higher education, and political economies of education. Dr. Dancy is the author or co-author of nearly 100 journal articles, book chapters, monographs, and publications related to education and society. His seven books include The Brother Code: Manhood and Masculinity among African American Men in College (2012), African American Males and Education: Researching the Convergence of Race and Identity (2012) (with M. Christopher Brown II), Educating African American Males: Challenges of Context, Possibilities for Practice (2013) (with M. Christopher Brown II and James Earl Davis), Black Male Collegians: Increasing Access, Retention, and Persistence in Higher Education (2014) (with Robert Palmer, J. Luke Wood, and Terrell Strayhorn), and Black Colleges across the Diaspora: Global Perspectives on Race and Stratification (2017) (with M. Christopher Brown II).

Dr. Dancy’s most recent book with the University Press of Kentucky, Black Freedom Struggle in Urban Appalachia (with Juwan Bennett, Christy McGuire, Lori Delale O-Connor, and Sabina Vaught) is the culmination of a six-year research project with Hill District educators and residents. The book explores the interplay of creative self-determination, intellectual insurgency, and political education in Pittsburgh. His research and scholarly essays are published in numerous academic journals including Teachers College Record, Gender and Education, Urban Education, Journal of Negro Education, Journal of School Leadership, and the Western Journal of Black Studies (among many others).

Dr. Dancy received research awards from several national research institutes and associations, including the American Education Research Association (Division-J) and the Association for the Study of Higher Education Council on Ethnic Participation. Diverse Issues in Higher Education has named him Top Emerging Scholar (2014) and Distinguished Educator (2018) for his contribution to the study of race and gender issues in higher education. In 2022, he received the Derrick Bell Legacy Award from the Critical Race Studies in Education Association and delivered the American Educational Studies Association’s R. Freeman Butts Endowed Lecture (with his former doctoral student, Christopher M. Wright). His research and scholarship are cited in national periodicals including ABC News, Forbes, Ebony, Diverse Issues in Higher Education, and The Root.com, and he has served as subject matter correspondent for The Grio News with Marc Lamont Hill.

Additionally, Dr. Dancy is book series editor for Contemporary Perspectives in Race and Ethnic Relations with Emerald Press, and editorial board member for the Borderless book series with West Virginia University Press. He is past associate editor of AERA journal, Educational Researcher, and past senior editor of the College Student Affairs Journal. Dr. Dancy is an advisory board member for the Thurgood Marshall College Fund Payne Center for Social Justice, an executive board member of the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in American Higher Education and past chair of the Research Focus on Black Education Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association.

Dr. Dancy received his B.S. degree in psychology with honors from the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff and two degrees in the study of organizational theory and governance: the Master of Health Services Administration from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and a Ph.D. with distinction in educational leadership and research from Louisiana State University with cognates in higher education administration and sociology. His dissertation won the School of Education’s Dissertation of the Year Award and a Citation for Excellence from the American Educational Research Association’s Division J.