Faculty/Staff Book Club Fall 2025: The Certainty Illusion

Maryanne Wolf is a scholar, mother, teacher, and advocate for children and literacy around the world. She is the Director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies; the Chapman University Presidential Fellow at Chapman University; the former John DiBiaggio Professor of Citizenship and Public Service; and the Director of the Center for Reading and Language Research in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University. She is the recipient of multiple research honors, including the Fulbright Fellowship and the highest awards by the International Dyslexia Association, the Australian Learning Disabilities Association, the Dyslexia Foundation, and the highest teaching awards from the Massachusetts and the American Psychological associations.

She is the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (HarperCollins, 2007, translated in fourteen languages), Dyslexia, Fluency, and the Brain (editor; York, 2001), Tales of Literacy for the 21st Century (Oxford University Press, 2016), the RAVE-O reading curriculum, the RAN/RAS naming-speed tests (with Martha Denckla), and more than 160 scientific publications. One of the founding members of Curious Learning, she is involved in global literacy initiatives that help teach children to read, particularly in remote regions of the world and rural regions of the United States. She has given frequent lectures on literacy as a basic human right to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences at the Vatican and serves as an external advisor to multiple boards, including the Canadian Children's Literacy Foundation and the International Monetary Fund. She has two sons and lives in Los Angeles.