Susan Merrill Squier

I teach courses that investigate the relations between literature (broadly construed), medicine and disability, science, and gender.  What this means is that my courses are usually trans-disciplinary: in my seminars we investigate the ways disciplines construct, share, transform and police knowledge. And we do so, whenever we can, by working in both theoretical and applied ways.  So, in my course on "Gender and Science: Reproduction," we read about the development of the reproductive sciences as fields linking human and animal science and medicine, and then we visit laboratories and talk with reproductive scientists in the college of agriculture. In my comics class this semester (2010), we will both read comics and secondary works about comics and also dedicate some of the seminar to studio time, where we learn the basics of creating comics in order to understand precisely what the medium requires and makes possible.  In recent years I have also taught feminist science studies and the foundations of science studies as graduate seminars, as well as undergraduate seminars on "Disability, Normativity, Enhancement" and "Medicine, Illness, Disability and Culture."  In Fall 2010 I will be teaching an undergraduate honors seminar, "Chicken Culture."  My teaching philosophy reflects years spent in several lively interdisciplinary thinking and writing communities: as member of the Women's Studies Department and teacher of a women's studies doctoral seminar at Penn State called "Feminist Perspectives on Research and Teaching Across the Disciplines," as a longtime member of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, and as a participant in the Animal Studies group at Penn State.

Alison Bechdel's visit to Penn State in March was a major highlight of the seminar and of the semester as a whole. Here she is at a book signing at our local great comics store, The Comic Swap.

And here she is before a mural of one of her major early influences, Charles Addams.

Honors Freshman Seminar, "Chicken Culture"
We’ll think about the chicken as an animal and an object of knowledge, and we’ll consider the place of chickens in fields as diverse as biology, anthropology, contemporary medicine, American fiction and theater, film and animation,  women’s studies, disability studies, and economics. Our goal: to discover the long-standing, complex, and productive relationship human beings have had to the common domestic chicken.