(Posted February 18, 2015)

HUNTINGDON, Pa. -- Jeanine Staples, associate professor of education and African-American tudies, will speak at Juniata College on "The Five Reasons Why We Haven't Cured Racism (and the Eight Ways We Can)" at 7 p.m., Wednesday, Feb. 11, in Sill Boardroom in the von Liebig Center for Science.

The lecture is part of Juniata's Beyond Tolerance series, which focuses several lectures or workshops on diversity-related topics each semester. The 7 p.m. session is free and open to the public. There will be a 3 p.m session earler in the day that is open for all Juniata students, and employees.

Staples' talk will detail how society relies on several primary indicators to verify the absence of racism, and then she will explain how these indicators can be misleading. In addition to identifying these misleading indicators, she will suggest alternative methods designed to help eliminate racism in everyday interactions.

Participants at the lecture will receive practical exercises and methods to tackle issues of racism in interpersonal and social situations.

At Penn State, Staples' research has focused on how media, popular culture, language and technology can affect how schoolchildren attain literacy.

She has garnered a variety of awards for her teaching and scholarship. In 2005 she received the Ralph C. Preston Award for Scholarship in Teaching and Literacy Research. She was named a Distinguished Educator in the state of Pennsylvania in 2007 and was recently named a GATE Fellow in Teacher Preparation and Research.

She holds a variety of fellowships, including Faculty Fellow at Penn State's Africana Research Center, Penn State Faculty Fellow at the Social Science Research Institute/Children Youth & Families Consortium, and Senior Fellow at Columbia University Law School's Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies. In 2014, she was a visiting scholar at the University of Rhode Island's Harrington School of Communication.

She earned a bachelor's degree in English literature from Howard University and went on to earn a master's degree in teaching and curriculum from Harvard University. She earned a doctorate in reading, writing and literacy from the University of Pennsylvania.

She started her academic career as an assistant professor of education at the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2005. She joined the Penn State faculty in 2008.

Contact April Feagley at feaglea@juniata.edu or (814) 641-3131 for more information.