Susan is a historian, researcher and educator. Currently, she holds the positions of History Department Chair and Coordinator of Global Initiatives at the Ellis School.  As a digital humanist, her classes in European, World, and Gender History at Ellis regularly create and deploy a wide range of digital and innovative pedagogies and tools, such as digital storytelling, RPG activities, gamification, and history crowdsourcing. She is also the co-designer and co-teacher of the new Global Leadership x Design Course, an interdisciplinary class, in which students enhance their global knowledge, essential skills, and social entrepreneurial strategies to become effective, principled, and innovative change makers in the 21st century. In her role as Global Initiatives Coordinator, Susan is developing an integrated global education program in academics, international experiences, signature programming, and leadership.

Susan received her Ph.D. in Soviet History and has taught extensively at the university level, including honors courses and immersion programs in international studies. Her scholarship primarily focuses on the intersection of politics, identity, and imagery. Susan’s recent research includes a study of female images in Soviet wartime propaganda, national identity formation in the 2014 Sochi Olympics, and a biography of a Stalin portrait (cited as one of the top 10 articles in Slavic Studies in 2012). Susan is also the co-curator of Stalinka, a digital library of Staliniana which serves as an extensive online scholarly and teaching resource on Stalin/ism. Last year, Susan was also selected as a national representative of the Digital Public Library of America.