Susan Nance is a historian of communication and live performance in the United States and the Ottoman Empire. In her research, Susan seeks out the perspectives of individuals who have worked to get their message across to the right audience at just the right moment in a financially viable way. She has examined the labor of such creative people in the context of African-American alternative spirituality, the Ottoman travel industry, American publishing, fraternal orders, civic festivals, circuses and beyond.
Susan is Assistant Professor of US History at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada and affiliated faculty with the Campbell Centre for the Study of Animal Welfare. She received her Ph.D from the University of California, Berkeley. Her previous careers include eleven years of labor in the retail chocolate business, eight years as a treeplanter, and four more as a crew manager for a silviculture company in British Columbia. She is a dyed-in-the-wool westerner and dual citizen; the entire North American west is her home.
