Jeanine Staples

Professional Bio

Jeanine Staples is associate professor of literacy and language, African American studies, and women's, gender, and sexuality studies at the Penn State. As an educational anthropologist, she focuses on dismantling supremacist patriarchies through research, teaching, and coaching. As a sociocultural literacist, she explores personal and public voices and stories to solve personal and public problems. She accomplishes these objectives by researching the evolutionary nature and function of new literacies and texts through the discourses of narrative research. Her work exposes the foundations of various personal and social ills such as racism, sexism, and abelism; it also provides a means for curing those ills. For more on the intersectionalities she explores, see her latest book, The Revelations of Asher: Towards Supreme Love in Self (Peter Lang, 2016) and her acclaimed 2014 TEDx talk: “How to Die Peacefully.” Professor Staples earned her bachelor’s degree in English literature and urban education from Howard University, her master’s degree in teaching and curriculum from Harvard University, and her doctoral degree in reading, writing, and literacy, with distinction, from the University of Pennsylvania.

Professor Staples has been the recipient of The Ralph C. Preston Award for Scholarship in Teaching and Literacy Research in the Service of Social Justice – The University of Pennsylvania (2005), The National Council of Teachers of English Early Career Educator of Color Leadership Award (2008), The Global Awareness in Teacher Education Award – University of Maryland College Park (2008), and Research Fellow for the Stanford Center on Adolescence (2008). She was named a board member for the Africana Research Center at Penn State (2013–2017) and a Fellow for the Social Science Research Institute/Children, Youth and Family Consortium (SSRI/CYFC) (2014). She was also named a Senior Fellow at Columbia University School of Law's Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies and senior visiting scholar at the University of Rhode Island's Harrington School of Communications (2014–2015, respectively).