Sam Wineburg

Sam Wineburg

Professor of Education, Stanford University

Sam Wineburg is the Margaret Jacks Professor of Education and, by courtesy, of History & American Studies at Stanford University. Educated at Brown and Berkeley, he holds a doctorate in Psychological Studies in Education from Stanford and an honorary doctorate from Sweden’s Umeå University.

Wineburg heads the Stanford History Education Group, whose curriculum and assessments have been downloaded nearly ten million times, making it one of the largest providers of free curriculum in the world. His current work focuses on how people judge the credibility of digital content, research that has been reported in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, Time Magazine, BBC, and Die Zeit, and translated into dozens of languages.

Wineburg’s scholarship sits at the crossroads of three fields: history, education, and the psychology of teaching and learning. His articles and commentaries have appeared in such diverse outlets as Cognitive Science, Journal of American History, Smithsonian Magazine, New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today and the Los Angeles Times.

In 2002 his book, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past won the Frederic W. Ness Award from the Association of American Colleges and Universities for work that makes the most important contribution to the “improvement of Liberal Education and understanding the Liberal Arts.”

In 2013, he was named the Obama-Nehru Distinguished Chair by the US-India Fulbright Commission and spent four months crisscrossing India giving lectures about his work.

His 2018 book, Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone), was published by the University of Chicago Press.

In 2015 he was inducted into the National Academy of Education.

And in 2020, he was awarded UNESCO’s “Global Media and Information” prize.