Susan Eisenberg
Areas of Expertise
Poetry; Personal Narrative; Medical Humanities; Occupational Segregation; Labor Arts
Email: seis@brandeis.edu
Current Project
Awarded a Mass Foundation for the Humanities “Liberty and Justice for All” grant, Susan’s installation, On Equal Terms: Women in Trades 30 Years Strong, exhibits October 2008 - January 2009 at the WSRC Kniznick Gallery. She’s developing touring for Perpetual Care, an exhibit of photographs and poems that opens conversation on chronic illness; and creating a performance of slides and poems from that material.
Biography
A pioneering tradeswoman licensed as a master electrician, she helped shape the cultural expression and analytical thinking of the tradeswomen’s movement nationally and internationally - speaking at the U.S. Department of Labor and the International Labour Organization in Switzerland. In celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of affirmative action policies that opened construction to women, she is re-imaging the installation that exhibited fifteen years ago at the AFL-CIO George Meany Center for Labor Studies. On Equal Terms will exhibit at the WSRC gallery in fall 2008.
Perpetual Care, an exhibit of twenty photographs accompanied by a cycle of poems, opens conversation on chronic illness. Photos of Perpetual Care have shown at Lesley University, the Newton Free Library Gallery, the Kniznick Gallery at Brandeis, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, the Boston Public Library West End Branch, and as part of a traveling exhibit of Visual Aid in San Francisco.
Education
M.F.A., Warren Wilson College
B.A., University of Michigan
Representative Publications
Eisenberg, Susan. Blind Spot. Omaha: Backwaters Press, 2006
Eisenberg, Susan. We’ll Call You If We Need You: Experiences of Women Working Construction. Ithaca: Cornell, 1998.
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