Faculty Member, History
About
Susan Nance is a historian of communication and live entertainment, and Assistant Professor at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario. She received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 2003. She has since published on the histories of parades, civic festivals and the business of tourism, as well as a book, "How the Arabian Nights Inspired the American Dream, 1790-1935" (University of North Carolina Press, 2009), documenting uses of Eastern personae in amateur and professional entertainment. Susan's most recent work, "Seeing the Elephant," documents the lives and labors of Asian elephants in 19th-century American circuses, and is the first to account for non-human behavior in the development of the American entertainment industry. Next up is a similar project to historicize horse and cattle behavior within the sport of rodeo in Canada and the United States. An experimental portion of this project appeared last year as “Becoming Bodacious: Aufstieg und Fall eines Rodeo-Bullen [Becoming Bodacious: The Rise and Fall of a Rodeo Bull],” in Ich, das Tier: Tiere als Persönlichkeiten in Kunst, Wissenschaft und Geschichte, edited by Keike Fuhlbrügge, Jessica Ullrich and Friedrich Weltzien (Berlin: Reimer Verlag, 2008). The curious may visit: www.susannance.com
Contact Information
Department of History
University of Guelph
50 Stone Rd. E.
Guelph, ON N1G 2W1
