Susan Stryker

Susan O'Neal Stryker (born 1961) is an American professor, author, filmmaker, and theorist whose work focuses on gender and human sexuality. She is Professor of Gender and Women's Studies, former director of the Institute for LGBT Studies, and founder of the Transgender Studies Initiative at the University of Arizona, and is currently on leave while holding an appointment as Visiting Professor of Women's Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University (2019–20). Stryker also serves on the Advisory Council of METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence). She is the author of several books about LGBT history and culture. 2Early life Stryker received a bachelor's degree in Letters from University of Oklahoma in 1983. She earned a Ph.D. in United States History at the University of California, Berkeley in 1992; the doctoral thesis she presented was Making Mormonism: A Critical and Historical Analysis of Cultural Formation. 2Career Stryker is Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Arizona, and is the former director of the university's Institute for LGBT Studies. She has served as a visiting professor at Harvard University, University of California, Santa Cruz, and Simon Fraser University. She is an openly lesbian trans woman who has produced a significant body of work about transgender and queer culture.She came out as transgender and began to transition shortly after earning her doctorate. Her scholarly article "My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix", published in 1994, was her first published academic article, and after trail-blazing Australian transgender academic Roberta Perkins who began publishing her research on female sex workers in the 1980s, one of the first articles ever published in a peer-reviewed academic journal by an openly transgender author.She was later awarded a postdoctoral research fellowship in human sexuality studies at Stanford University, sponsored by the Social Science Research Council and the Ford Foundatio