Susan Merrill Squier

Susan Merrill Squier is Julia Gregg Brill Professor of Women’s Studies and English at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author or editor of eight books, including Babies in Bottles: Twentieth Century Visions of Reproductive Technology (1994), Playing Dolly: Technocultural Formations, Fantasies, and Fictions of Assisted Reproduction (1999), and Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedicine (2004). Her most recent book, Poultry Science, Chicken Culture (2011), recipient of the Michelle Kendrick Prize of the Society for Literature Science and the Arts, details the roles played by chickens and eggs in the development of embryology, biology, and regenerative medicine; demonstrates the types of knowledge that have been lost as food production moved from small-scale farming to industrial agriculture; analyzes the fears and risks behind the panic around avian flu; and investigates the connection between women and chickens. She is a co-organizer of the annual international conference series, Graphic Medicine (held in London 2010, Chicago 2011, and Toronto 2012). With Dr. Ian Williams (UK) she co-edits the Penn State University Press book series, Graphic Medicine, which publishes scholarly studies of comics, as well as comics themselves, that enact and explore the experiences of health care, medicine, illness, and disability.