Biography

Shani Harris, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Spelman College. She is the Founder and Director of the Sexual Health and Media Lab, a research group that explores the ways that media affects the sexual behaviors and sexual attitudes of adolescents and young adults and that develops new media to positively influence sexual decision making in youth. Dr. Harris currently directs the Dr. Harris directs the SHE Program, a federally funded Substance Abuse (SA) and HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis C prevention/intervention program for African American young adult women, ages 18-24. Earlier projects include the development of an entertainment-education based sexual risk prevention web series funded by the National Institutes of Health, an examination of how exposure to sexually objectifying music videos affects brain and physiological responses, and a study of the impact of sexual imagery on attitudes and behaviors. She is the Editor of The Feminist Psychologist, newsletter for the Society of the Psychology of Women, Division 35 of the American Psychological Associate. She is the former Chair of the Feminist Media Task Force, a Division 35 initiative. In that role she developed FemPop: Feminist Perspectives of Popular Culture, a website that explored feminist perspectives on media. Dr. Harris completed postdoctoral fellowships at Emory University's Rollins School of Public Health and at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health. She received both her Doctorate and Master’s degrees from Duke University in the area of Clinical Psychology (2003, 2000) and received her B.A. from Spelman College in 1997.