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Jennie Smith-Pariola

Board of Trustees member

Jennie Smith-Pariola was appointed to the Library Board in June 2009, filling a vacancy in a 7-year term ending December 2015.

She received a Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 1998. Starting in 1998, she served as assistant then associate professor at Berry College in Georgia, where she founded the Anthropology Program and the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program, becoming department chair in 2001 and program director in 2003. Her career as an anthropologist has provided opportunities to live in other cultures, including nearly six years in Haiti. She also worked with the United Nations as an international human rights observer.

Jennie, her husband and their daughters moved to Westerville in 2006. In addition to caring for her family, she often lectures at Otterbein College and has accepted a position as Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology there, starting in September. She will be the first anthropologist on the Otterbein faculty and will be working on establishing a cultural anthropology program there.

As a student, researcher, college professor and parent, Jennie has always loved libraries and the positive influence they have in an age in which the information we consume is increasingly global. Her two daughters have enjoyed many of the Library’s programs for children. She designed a nature-based home preschool program for them largely based on resources from WPL—often with some very helpful assistance from the children’s librarians.

Contact Information

Your Library Board members are always interested in the comments and suggestions of their customers. Please feel free to e-mail Jennie at jsmith-pariola@otterbein.edu.