Richard Kania served in the United States Military as a member of
the United States Army from 1968 to 1972, where he saw service in Berlin and Vietnam. He continued his
military career as a member of the Army Reserve from 1972 until 2007. He was deployed stateside for the
first Gulf War and Somalia. He retired as a Lieutenant Colonel in 2007.
In December 2005,
Dr. Richard Kania joined Jacksonville State University as the head of the Criminal Justice Department. Previously,
since 1999, he had been at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke leading their Department of Sociology and Criminal
Justice. From 1982 to 1999, he was at Guilford College in Greensboro, NC, rising to full professor, to
head a department at Guilford. He taught at UNC-Charlotte, and also for the Southern Police Institute of
the University of Louisville and as a Senior Fulbright Professor for the Central European University in Warsaw, Poland while
on sabbaticals. In 2004-2005, he was awarded his second Senior Fulbright Professorship, teaching at the
Belarusian State University in Minsk, the Republic of Belarus.
Dr. Kania originally majored in anthropology at Florida State University, where he earned his BA with Honors in 1968.
He continued in anthropology at the University of Virginia, earning the MA there in 1974, and wrote his MA thesis on
conflict resolution and the law ways of the Hopi of Arizona.
Mid-way through his doctoral degree, his experiences as a Charlottesville Police Department (Virginia) police officer,
led him to change his emphasis and eventually pursue a teaching career in Criminal Justice. Presently,
Dr. Richard Kania is also a sworn reserve deputy for the Calhoun County Sheriff’s Office (Alabama).
Dr. Richard Kania has published over 20 articles in scholarly journals and authored one book: The
1605 Waymouth Expedition to the Coast of Maine: An Assessment of the Rosier Text, He has also co-authored: Diversity
and National Identity in Belarus; Police and the Use of Force: The Savannah Study.