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Talk is part of Presidential Lecture Series on Diversity
As a part of the Presidential Lecture Series on Diversity, Claude Steele, Lucy Stern Professor of the Social Sciences and Director for the Center of Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, will give a talk at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 21 in Kirby Hall of Civil Rights room 104.
The lecture, “Identity Happens: How Stereotype- and Identity-Threat Affect Intellectual Performance and Shape the Challenges of an Integrated Society,” is the keynote address for Black History Month. It explores this year’s theme, “The Modern Black Experience: Examining the Past to Define our Place in the Future.”
Free and open to the public, the lecture is also sponsored by the Office of Intercultural Development.
The lecture will discuss how people cope with self-image threats and how being negatively stereotyped can affect the shaping of intellectual identity and performance. It will also discuss collective models of prejudice and self-esteem’s role in shaping interests, motivations, and identity.
Steele joined the Stanford faculty in 1991 and previously served on the faculties of the University of Michigan, University of Washington, and University of Utah. He has served as president of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, president of the Western Psychological Association, and was a member of the Board of Directors of the American Psychological Society.
Steele has won many awards including the Gordon Allport Intergroup Relations Prize and the Distinguished Scientific Career Awards from both the American Psychological Association and the American Psychological Society. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Chicago, Yale University, and Princeton University.
The Presidential Speaker Series on Diversity was initiated in 2000 to encourage intellectual discourse on diversity. Historian Douglas Brinkley, who authored a biography of Rosa Parks, was the inaugural speaker in the program. Other past lecturers have included Angela Davis, an activist and professor at University of California-Santa Cruz; David Levering Lewis, a Pulitzer Prize winner and recipient of the MacArthur Foundation’s Genius Grant; and Oscar Arias Sanchez, former president of Costa Rica and 1987 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.