Contact: Stephen Wilson, 610-330-3324, wilsonsr@lafayette.edu
EASTON, Pa. — Lafayette College welcomes race and race relations scholar Shelby Steele to campus Tuesday, Oct. 3. Steele will deliver a lecture, “Modern Liberalism and Madame Bovary,” 7 p.m. in 104 Kirby Hall of Civil Rights.
Steele is the Robert J. and Marion E. Oster Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Appointed a Hoover fellow in 1994, he specializes in the study of race relations, multiculturalism, and affirmative action.
In 2006, Steele received the Bradley Prize for his contributions to the study of race in America. In 2004, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal. In 1991, his work on the documentary Seven Days in Bensonhurst was recognized with an Emmy Award and two awards for television documentary writing—the Writer’s Guild Award and the San Francisco Film Festival Award.
“We are excited to hear Shelby Steele’s perspective on the sources of divisions and polarization in America,” says Mark Crain, William E. Simon Professor of Political Economy and chair of policy studies at Lafayette. “His experiences and ideas offer important insights into some of the greatest social challenges of our time.”
Steele received the National Book Critic’s Circle Award in 1990 in the general nonfiction category for The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America. Other books by Steele include A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win (Free Press, 2007), White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era (HarperCollins 2006), and A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America.