Meira Levinson

Meira Levinson is the Chen Family Educational Foundations Professor in the Graduate School of Education. Meira is a political theorist/philosopher of education who is working to start a global field of educational ethics that is philosophically rigorous, disciplinarily and experientially inclusive, and both relevant to and informed by educational policy and practice. In doing so, she draws upon scholarship from multiple disciplines as well as her eight years of experience teaching middle school humanities, civics, history, and English in the Atlanta and Boston Public Schools. 

Meira has written or co-edited nine books, including Civic Contestation in Global Education and Educational Equity in a Global Context (both 2024, with Ellis Reid, Tatiana Geron, and Sara O’Brien), Instructional Moves for Powerful Teaching in Higher Education (2023, co-authored with Jeremy Murphy), Democratic Discord in Schools (2019, with Jacob Fay), winner of the 2020 AERA Moral Development and Education SIG Outstanding Book Award, and Dilemmas of Educational Ethics (2016, with Jacob Fay). Her book No Citizen Left Behind (2012) won awards in political science, philosophy, social studies, and education and has been translated into Chinese and Japanese. Meira shares educational ethics resources on JusticeinSchools.org, materials to support K-12 educators working in politically charged environments at Values in Teaching, and resources for youth activists and teacher allies at YouthinFront.net. Each of these projects reflects Levinson's commitment to achieving productive cross-fertilization — without loss of rigor — among scholarship, policy, and practice.

Meira earned a B.A. in philosophy from Yale and a D.Phil. in politics from Nuffield College, Oxford University. Her work has been supported by fellowships from Guggenheim, the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and the National Academy of Education. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, Meira taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.