Professional Biography
Ed Brockenbrough is an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education (Penn GSE) in Philadelphia, PA, where he teaches courses on diversity and social justice issues in education to doctoral students as well as to current and future K–12 educators. His research focuses on negotiations of identity, pedagogy, and power in urban educational spaces, particularly through the lenses of Black masculinity studies and queer of color critique. Previous projects include a study of an HIV/AIDS community-based agency that functioned as a pedagogical space for Black queer youth; and the SENT Study, an examination of how young Black queer males used social media and internet sites as alternative sources for sex education, which was funded by the University of Rochester’s Center for AIDS Research and the University of Pennsylvania’s Calvin Bland Faculty Fellowship. His latest research project explores the sexuality education experiences of queer Gen-Zers in the United States. Dr. Brockenbrough’s work has appeared in a variety of peer-reviewed journals and edited collections, and he is the author of two books: Black Men Teaching in Urban Schools: Reassessing Masculinity (Routledge, 2018), which is available for free download; and Learning While Black and Queer: Understanding the Educational Experiences of Black LGBTQ+ Youth (Harvard Education Press, 2024), which is available for pre-order.
Prior to joining Penn GSE’s faculty, Dr. Brockenbrough served as a faculty member at the University of Rochester’s Warner Graduate School of Education, where he prepared urban teachers as Director of the Urban Teaching and Leadership program. He also facilitated professional development sessions on LGBTQ+ issues for educators in the Rochester City School District, and he has continued doing so for educators in the School District of Philadelphia as a co-chair of the Philadelphia chapter of GLSEN. In addition to his work in K–12 schools, Dr. Brockenbrough has participated in and served on the board of directors for several community-based organizations serving queer communities of color. Prior to his graduate studies at Penn GSE from 2002 to 2008, Dr. Brockenbrough began his educational career as a middle and high school history teacher at an independent school in the Bronx, NY, and he served as co-chair for the New York City chapter of GLSEN, leading professional development workshops on LGBTQ+ issues for educators across the New York metropolitan area.
Research Interests and Current Projects
Dr. Brockenbrough’s research focuses on negotiations of identity, pedagogy, and power in urban educational contexts, particularly through the lenses of Black masculinity studies and queer of color critique. His dissertation, funded by a grant from the American Educational Research Association and the US Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, examined the challenges and opportunities encountered by Black male teachers in an urban, predominantly Black school district. Along with generating several journal articles, that research will appear in a sole-authored book titled Black Men Teaching in Urban Schools: Reassessing Masculinity, which was published by Routledge in early 2018.
His second line of inquiry on the educational perspectives and needs of queer youth of color emerged from an ethnography of an HIV/AIDS prevention center that operated as an alternative, culturally responsive pedagogical space for Black queer youth. That ethnography was followed by a mixed-methods study conducted with Dr. Mitchell Wharton — and funded by the University of Rochester’s Center for AIDS Research and the University of Pennsylvania’s Calvin Bland Faculty Fellowship — on the sexually oriented engagements of networked technologies by young Black men who have sex with men (The SENT Study). These studies inform his ongoing work in queer studies in education, with a particular attention to queerly responsive sexual health education.
Selected Publications
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