Rate My Professor Jason Stanley

Jason Stanley is the Bissell-Heyd-Associates Chair in American Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy and a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He joined the university in 2025. His work spans philosophy of language, epistemology, linguistics, cognitive science, and social and political philosophy. Before his appointment at the University of Toronto, Stanley held faculty positions at Yale University from 2013 to 2025, Rutgers University from 2004 to 2013, the University of Michigan from 2000 to 2004, and Cornell University from 1995 to 2000. He also serves as a Distinguished Professor at the Kyiv School of Economics.

Stanley received a BA from Stony Brook University in 1990 and a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1995. He is the author of seven books, including Knowledge and Practical Interests (2005), which received the American Philosophical Association Book Prize in 2007; How Propaganda Works (2015), which received the PROSE Award in Philosophy in 2016; How Fascism Works (2018); The Politics of Language (2023, co-authored with David Beaver); and Erasing History (2024). Stanley has published dozens of scholarly articles and writes for general audiences in outlets such as The New York Times and The Guardian on topics including authoritarianism, propaganda, free speech, mass incarceration, and democracy. He is a member of the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School, a fellow of the African American Policy Forum, and serves on the advisory board of the Prison Policy Initiative.