Susan Gardner

Susan Gardner, a Wisconsin native, is associate professor of American Indian literatures in the English Department at UNC Charlotte. Her Ph.D. is from Rhodes University, South Africa, where she introduced the study of Black South African autobiography. She has taught at universities in Papua New Guinea, Australia (where she is contributing editor of a women's studies journal), southern Africa (where she taught the first course on feminist literary criticism at the University of the Witwatersand, Johannesburg) and Denmark. Her research concerns collecting oral histories with her students from Native Carolinian Indian elders, and the fiction of Dakota Sioux ethnographer Ella Deloria (1888-1971).

She is currently completing a biography, A Vision of Double Woman: Ella Cara Deloria and the Profession of Kinship, for the University of Nebraska Press. Recently, she was elected to the editorial board of Studies in American Indian Literatures. In June 2006 she traveled to China with a UNC Charlotte group studying architecture and sacred places; her favorite destination was an oasis town in the Gobi desert, at the terminus of the Silk Road. In 2006-07, she is serving as advisor to UNC-system students at Kingston University near London, England, one of UNC Charlotte's international exchange partners. Susan’s personal interests include summers studying on Indian reservations in South Dakota, Quaker history, her cat (Chance), walking and detective novels featuring intrepid women investigators.

Now in her sixteenth year at UNC Charlotte, she says the university offers her an unparalleled opportunity to teach one of the most diverse student populations she has encountered anywhere. She also appreciates the freedom she has been given to design new courses such as Native North American Indian Women (which she team-teaches on NC-REN with an Indian colleague at UNC Pembroke), American Indian Autobiography, American Indians & Children's Literature, and two courses on American Indians in film.