Education Policy Speaker Series

Dr. Jonathan E. Collins 
Assistant Professor of Education, Political Science, and International and Public Affairs – Brown University

​Jonathan E. Collins (he/him/his) is an assistant professor of Education, Political Science, and International and Public Affairs at Brown University. He is also currently serving as a visiting research fellow at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. At Brown, Professor Collins holds affiliations with the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, the Choices Program, and the Taubman Center for American Politics and Policy. His research focuses on race and ethnic politics, urban politics, state and local politics, education politics and policy, and democratic theory.

As a researcher, Collins has been at the forefront of the study of public participation at school board meetings. He is the founder and director of the Brown University PAVED Research Initiative through which he is leading new democratic innovation initiatives aimed at empowering BIPOC communities. He has also written on African American voting behavior, local election reform, and school finance policy. His scholarship has been published in the American Political Science Review, Political Behavior, the Peabody Journal of Education, the Urban Affairs Review, the Journal of Urban Affairs, and Local Government Studies.

He is the recipient of numerous awards including the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship Award, the American Political Science Association’s Susan Clarke Young Scholar Award, and the Brown University Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship Award. His research has been funded by the Spencer Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES).

He holds a Ph.D. in political science and an M.A. in African American Studies from the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) as well as a B.A. in English from Morehouse College.