Adam Howard is the Charles A. Dana Professor and Chair of the Education Department at Colby College. For more than 25 years, he has studied adolescents and the social forces and institutions that shape their self-understandings, practices, and relations, publishing widely in education and sociology. His books include Learning Privilege: Lessons of Power and Identity in Affluent Schooling, Negotiating Privilege and Identity in Educational Contexts, Educating Elites: Class Privilege and Educational Advantage, Privileged Brotherhoods: Making Men at Elite All-Boys Schools, and his forthcoming book, The Secret World of Boys.
Howard is widely recognized for pioneering research methods that gain rare access to the hidden forces shaping boys’ identity-making in various spaces. He regularly mentors undergraduate research teams and brings those insights into public conversation.
Howard grew up in rural Kentucky in poverty and served in the U.S. Army Reserves while attending college as a first-generation student, experiences that continue to ground his scholarship and public engagement on how inequality shapes young people’s lives. He earned his undergraduate degree at Berea College before graduate study at Harvard and University of Cincinnati.
Beyond the academy, Howard founded @sexedforguys, a TikTok-based public sociology project that reaches tens of thousands with honest, often humorous conversations about masculinity, sex education, and emotional well-being. His work has been featured in Rolling Stone, USA Today, Time, NPR’s Here and Now, and other outlets covering education and culture. He also appears as a featured expert in the documentary The Boys in the Red Hats. Through a combination of scholarship, public outreach, and media engagement, Howard has become a leading voice on how boys are shaped by privilege, pressure, and possibility.