Susan Strasser

Home University: University of Delaware; Department of History

Susan Strasser will be teaching as a senior Fulbright scholar at the Department of History for

the summer term 2011. She is a historian of American consumer culture and has been praised

by the New Yorker for “retrieving what history discards: the taken-for-granted minutiae of

everyday life.” Susan Strasser graduated from Reed College and holds a Master’s and Ph.D.

degree from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Currently, she is a professor in

the Department of History of the University of Delaware and Senior Resident Scholar at the

Hagley Museum and Library's Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society.

Further, she has taught at The Evergreen State College, Princeton University, George

Washington University, and the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts,

Design, and Culture. She has received numerous fellowships e.g. from the Rockefeller and

Guggenheim foundations, the German Historical Institute, the Harvard Business School, the

Smithsonian Institution, and the University of London. Her research includes Never Done: A

History of American Housework (1982), which won the Sierra Prize of the Western

Association of Women Historians, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American

Mass Market (1989), and Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (1999), winner of the

Abel Wolman Award from the Public Works Historical Society. She is currently working on A

Historical Herbal, an account of the commerce and culture of medicinal herbs.

COURSES TAUGHT AT THE JOHN-F.-KENNEDY INSTITUTE:

32 404 - AS -

Environmental History of North America

32 413 - HS -

American Consumer History

John-F.-Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien