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MEADVILLE, Pa. – June 30, 2011 – Following national searches, Allegheny College has appointed three individuals to positions focusing on diversity and inclusive excellence.

Steven Canals will serve as associate director for gender and sexual orientation initiatives in the college’s Center for Intercultural Advancement and Student Success.  He will create programs, initiatives, services and partnerships that support, assist and empower students from diverse gender, sexual orientation and other intersecting identities.

Canals has worked since 2005 as a residence hall director, multicultural life program coordinator and LGBT resource coordinator at the State University of New York at Cortland. He has chaired committees, taught a first-year-experience course, designed campus-wide programming and presented workshops on topics including race, gender and sexual orientation. A native of New York, Canals earned an undergraduate degree in cinema and a graduate degree in student affairs and diversity from Binghamton University. His graduate research focused on the variables affecting the experiences of students of color at predominantly white institutions.

Tahirah Jordan, currently assistant director of admissions and coordinator for multicultural recruitment at Allegheny, will serve as assistant dean and director of the Center for Intercultural Advancement and Student Success. She will help to shape diversity programming at the college through collaboration with faculty, students and staff. Working closely with Chief Diversity Officer Lawrence T. Potter Jr., Jordan also will develop activities and programs to foster an understanding of diversity and inclusiveness, provide leadership and training in diversity awareness and sensitivity, and engage widely with the college community around issues of diversity, equity, access, social justice, campus climate and student success.

Jordan earned a juris doctor degree from North Carolina Central University with a concentration in critical race theory, education law, employment discrimination and civil rights. She also holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Hampton University, a private historically black college of the liberal arts and sciences in Virginia. Prior to joining Allegheny in 2008, she worked as an instructor and legal assistant in Raleigh, N.C., as well as a program assistant with the Higher Achievement Program in Washington, D.C.

Samira Mehta will serve as Allegheny’s sixth Northeast Consortium for Faculty Diversity Dissertation Scholar. She is a dissertation candidate in the American religious cultures course of study in Emory University’s Graduate Division of Religion. Her dissertation, “Beyond Chrismukkah: A Cultural History of the Christian/Jewish Blended Family 1965-2010,” addresses both cultural conversations around Christian/Jewish marriage and family as well as the experiences and ritual practices of those families.

Mehta has held fellowships from the Jacob Radar Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives and the Sloan Foundation’s Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life at Emory. Her writing has appeared in the Encyclopedia of Religion in America; the Encyclopedia of Muslim-American History; ARC, the Journal of the Faculty of Religious Studies, McGill University; Religion Dispatches; and the Religion in American History blog. She also is a founding staff member and has served as managing editor of the online journal Practical Matters. Committed to public scholarship, Mehta has taught at the Limmud Southeast retreat, the Decatur, Ga., Public Library and local congregations. Mehta earned a Master of Divinity degree from Harvard University and a bachelor’s degree in English, religion and women’s studies from Swarthmore College.

About Allegheny College

The 32nd oldest college in the nation, Allegheny will celebrate its bicentennial in 2015. One of the 40 schools featured in Loren Pope’s “Colleges That Change Lives,” Allegheny also is included among the 100 “best values” in national liberal arts colleges by Kiplinger’s, a private financial advising company.

Ninety percent of Allegheny alumni seeking employment start a career within eight months of graduation, and the college ranks in the top 5 percent of schools nationally whose students go on to earn Ph.D.s.