Educated at the University of Oklahoma (BA in Letters, 1983) and the University of California-Berkeley (PhD in United States History, 1992), Susan has held both tenured and short-term faculty positions, as well as visiting appointments and residential fellowships at numerous prestigious institutions including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, University of Pennsylvania, University of California-Santa Cruz, Indiana, Simon Fraser (Vancouver), and Macquarie (Sydney). Susan retired as full Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona, where she spent most of her professorial career, in 2020. 

 

Career highlights include serving as Director of the Institute for LGBT Studies at the University of Arizona 2011-2016, where she led the first-ever faculty cluster hire in trans studies; co-founding the academic journal

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly; and co-founding the Duke University Press book series ASTERISK: gender, trans-, and all that comes after. She is the recipient of both the David Kessler Award (2009) and the Michael Brudner Prize (2015) for career accomplishment in LGBT Studies, in addition to other professional honors.