John Diamond
Brown University
Professor of Sociology and Education Policy

Year Elected
2023
Membership status
Regular
John B. Diamond is Ford Foundation Professor of Sociology and Education Policy in the Sociology Department and the Annenberg Institute and a faculty affiliate in Africana Studies at Brown University. Before joining Brown, he held the Kellner Family Distinguished Chair in Urban Education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. A sociologist of race and education, he examines the relationship between social inequality and educational opportunity, focusing on how educational leadership, policies, and practices influence the educational experiences of students within school organizations. Diamond has published widely in sociology and education journals and is the co-author of Despite the Best Intentions: How Racial Inequality Thrives in Good Schools (with Amanda Lewis) and Distributed Leadership in Practice (co-edited with James Spillane). He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and a fellow of the American Educational Research Association. He was a resident fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and a NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow.
An engaged scholar, Diamond has served as an Advisory Board Member of the American Sociological Association's Sociology Action Network, a national planning team member of the Urban Research-Based Action Network (URBAN), and a member of the Research Advisory Panel of the National Coalition on School Diversity. In 2024, he won the Cox-Johnson-Frazier Award from the American Sociological Association for scholarship in service to social justice. He is the former co-editor of Sociology of Education (with Odis Johnson Jr). He holds a BA from the University of Michigan and a PhD in Sociology from Northwestern University.