Susan Merrill Squier

My research interests include the cultural studies of science and medicine, feminist theory, modern literature and culture, disability studies, animal studies, and comics. My publications reflect these diverse interests. In addition to my most recent book, Poultry Science, Chicken Culture: A Partial Alphabet (2011), I have also published Virginia Woolf and London: The Sexual Politics of the City (1985); Babies in Bottles: Twentieth Century Visions of Reproductive Technology (1994) and Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedicine (2004).  I am also editor of Women Writers and the City: Essays in Feminist Literary Criticism (1984) and Communities of the Air: Radio Century, Radio Culture (2003), and the co-editor of Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation (with Helen M. Cooper and Adrienne A. Munich, 1989) and Playing Dolly: Technocultural Formations, Fantasies, and Fictions of Assisted Reproduction (with E. Ann Kaplan, 1999). I am currently working on a study of comics as a resource for making meanings about illness, disability, and medicine, tentatively titled RX: CX--Comics and the Arts of Medicine.

Poultry Science, Chicken Culture
Subtitle: A Partial Alphabet
Author: Susan Merrill Squier
Subject: American Studies, Science
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-4924-8Pages: 296 pages, 23 illustrations
Publication Date: Rutgers University Press, 2011

"This vividly written transdisciplinary book is full of proof that chickens are good to think with, good to live with, good to inhabit thick histories with. Squier's "partial alphabet" invites human beings and chickens to reintroduce themselves in practices of love and care in art, science, domesticity, farming, and more."—Donna J. Haraway, author of When Species Meet (University of Minnesota Press, 2008)
"Squier offers a delightful, provocative, and unexpected look into the visible, and often hidden, interrelationships that bind human and fowl."-Gregg Mittman, author of Reel Nature: America's Romance with Wildlife on Film

Description: Poultry Science, Chicken Culture is a collection of engrossing, witty, and thought-provoking essays about the chicken—the familiar domestic bird that has played an intimate part in our cultural, scientific, social, economic, legal, and medical practices and concerns since ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Organized as a primer, the book reaches beyond narrow disciplines to discover why individuals are so fascinated with the humble, funny, overlooked, and omnipresent chicken. 

Spanning fascinating and diverse fields, Susan Merrill Squier assesses the chicken as the focus of film, photography, and visual art in many media; details some of the roles played by chickens and eggs in the development of embryology, biology, and regenerative medicine; traces the iconic figure of the chicken (and the chicken thief) in political discourse during the 2008 presidential election; demonstrates the types of knowledge that have been lost as food production moved from small-scale farming to industrial agriculture; investigates the connection between women and chickens; analyzes the fears and risks behind the panic around avian flu; and scrutinizes the role of chicken farming in international development.  A combination of personal passion and surprising scholarly information, Poultry Science, Chicken Culture will change forever the way you think about chickens.  
Awarded the Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize for the best academic book on literature, science, and the arts published by a member of the SLSA (Society for Literature, Science and the Arts.)

Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedicine (2004)
by Susan Merrill Squier
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Review from Duke University Press
Review from Isis (pdf version)
Review from Literature and Medicine (pdf version)
Review from American Journal of Bioethics (pdf version)

Communities of the Air: Radio Century, Radio Culture (2003)
by Susan Merrill Squier
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Playing Dolly : Technocultural Formations, Fantasies, and Fictions of Assisted Reproduction (1999)
Edited by E. Ann Kaplan and Susan Merrill Squier
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Babies in Bottles: Twentieth-Century Visions of Reproductive Technology (1994)
by Susan Merrill Squier
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Reviews by Rima D. Apple, Judy Z. Segal, and Kathleen Woodward

Arms and the Woman: War, Gender and Literary Representation (1989)
by Helen Cooper, Susan Squier, Adrienne Auslander Munich
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Virginia Woolf and London: The Sexual Politics of the City (1985)
by Susan Merrill Squier
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Women writers and the city: Essays in feminist literary criticism (1984)
by Susan Merrill Squier (Editor) Buy this book at Amazon

• Meditation, Disability, and Identity (pdf version)
• Ontogeny, Ontology, and Phylogeny: Embryonic Life and Stem Cell Technologies
• Speaking Women's Bodies: A Conversation
• The Ectogenesis Debate and the Cyborg: Imaging the Pregnant Body
• Wireless Possibilities, Posthuman Possibilities: Brain Radio, Community Radio, Radio Lazarus
• Negotiating Boundaries: From Assisted Reproduction to Assisted Replication
• A Conversation with Susan Squier