Anna Neumann, Professor of Higher Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, studies teaching in urban colleges and universities, with an eye toward improving first-generation students’ subject-matter learning in first- and second-year courses (in general/liberal education), and in post-graduate work (in law school). In this work, she seeks to illuminate what good teaching means and how it unfolds, how professors learn to teach, and professional development practices and programs for supporting teaching improvement.
Neumann’s research, which also examines professors’ intellectual careers, doctoral students’ learning of research, and academic organization and leadership, has been published in the American Educational Research Journal, Journal of Higher Education, Teachers College Record, Review of Higher Education, and others. Her books include Convergent Teaching: Tools to Spark Deeper Learning in College (with Aaron M. Pallas, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), a reconceptualization of undergraduate teaching with implications for improvement; Professing to Learn: Creating Tenured Lives and Careers in the American Research University, an analysis of 40 university professors’ scholarly learning and intellectual identity development in the early post-tenure career (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); and Learning from Our Lives: Women, Research, and Autobiography in Education (co-edited with Penelope L. Peterson, Teachers College Press, 1997), a study of the personal meaning of research in academic women’s lives in the field of education.
Other volumes address professors’ career-long learning and growth, collegiate cultures, and leadership cognition. Her work has been funded by the Spencer Foundation, the Teagle Foundation, the U.S. Office of Education, the Lilly Endowment, TIAA-CREF, and others.
A Fellow of the American Education Research Association and an elected member of the National Academy of Education, she also is the recipient of her field’s top two research awards: the Research Achievement Award of the Association for the Study of Higher Education, and the Exemplary Research Award of the American Educational Research Association, Division J (Higher and Postsecondary Education). Neumann is past president of the Association for the Study of Higher Education. For over a decade she directed the Program in Higher and Postsecondary Education at Teachers College where she also served as department chair.
