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Wayne Urban is Associate Director of the Education Policy Center and Professor of Higher Education Administration in the Department of Educational Leadership, Policy, and Technology Studies at The University of Alabama.  He was on the faculty at Georgia State University from 1971 to 2005, serving successively as Associate Professor, Professor, Research Professor, and Regents' Professor of Education.  He also had an appointment as Professor of History at GSU.  Additionally, he has taught at the University of Alabama-Birmingham, the University of South Florida, the University of Florida, Kent State University, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Virginia.  Internationally, he has taught at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia and at the University of South Australia in Adelaide.  In 1999 he was a Fulbright Senior Lecturer at the Cracow Pedagogical University in Cracow, Poland and in the fall of 2004 he served as the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in the Faculty of Education at York University in Toronto, Canada.

He is the author of Why Teachers Organized (1982), More than the Facts: The Research Division of the National Education Association (1998), Gender, Race, and the National Education Association: Professionalization and Its Limitations (2000), and More than Science and Sputnik: The National Defense Education Act (forthcoming, 2009); co-author (with Jennings L. Wagoner) of American Education: A History (1996, 2000, 2004); editor of Essays in Twentieth Century Southern Education: Exceptionalism and Its Limits (2000); and co-editor of Teacher Unions and Educational Change: Retrenchment or Reform (2004).  His current research interests are in the National Education Association and its Educational Policies Commission as a domestic and an international educational force and in the genesis and passage of the National Defense Education Act (1958).

At Georgia State University, he was chosen as the Alumni Distinguished Professor in 1998, received an undergraduate teaching award, was awarded the history department award for distinguished scholarship, served twice as chair of his department, and held numerous significant committee chairmanships and memberships at the department, college, and university level. Additionally, he has received a National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship in the late 1980s and, in 2004, a two-year grant from the Spencer Foundation for his study of the Educational Policies Commission, In 2005 he received the Mary Ann Raywid Award for excellence in educational research from the Society of Professors of Education.  He accepted the award and gave an address at the SPE sessions at the American Educational Research Association meeting in Montreal.  He has been editor of the American Educational Research Journal and Educational Studies and has served on several editorial boards, including, currently, the editorial board of the History of Education Review (Australia) and a Canadian historical journal.

He has been active in professional organizations, most recently the International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE).  He was elected to the ISCHE Executive Committee in 1999 and re-elected in 2002.  From 2000 until 2003, he served as Secretary of the ISCHE Executive Committee.  In 2003, he was elected to a three year term as Chair of the Executive Committee (President) of ISCHE.  In addition, he is a past president of the History of Education Society (USA) and the American Educational Studies Association and past vice-president of Division F, History and Historiography, of the American Educational Research Association.  He is currently on the editorial board of History of Education Review (Australia), Historical Studies in Education (Canada), and the History of Education Quarterly.