Susan Z. Swan

After 30 years as a university professor, Susan Z. Swan turned to freelance writing and editing full time, following a dream decades old to be able to work with words without the angst of grading.

She has a doctorate of philosophy in Rhetoric and Communication Theory from Ohio State University, a master’s in Communication Studies (also from Ohio State), and a bachelor’s in English literature and Education from Duke University. Susan has received a number of teaching awards, including ones from the Central States Communication Association and the University of South Dakota, as well as a faculty-of-the-year award from Zayed University in the United Arab Emirates. She has taught widely in the humanities and the social sciences, including a 48-credit full-year course in world classics. She has taught almost 80 different content courses, from public speaking and interpersonal communication to advertising principles and film criticism.

Susan has significant community organizing experience, including being a founding member (and then president and chair of the board of trustees) of an historical society in Springboro, Ohio. One of her proudest moments came when the 1878 Eastlake house and farmstead she restored in Ohio was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Originally from the mountains of North Carolina, Susan has traveled widely (and mostly on the cheap) – she’s visited 41 of the 50 states of the U.S. and much of Europe and the Middle East. She and her daughter went adventuring and spent almost 7 years in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, where she helped found a university for Arab women. Her favorite summer while overseas was spent in Yemen at a small language institute.

As a writer and researcher, Susan has been most interested in philosophies of communication and in popular culture. Her most recent publication looks at the heroic image of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al Nahyan as the co-founder of the UAE (a chapter in Drucker and Gumpert’s Heroes in a Global World). Her interest in film took form in an essay on “Gothic Drama in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast” (in Critical Studies in Mass Communication). Susan has published 10 other professional articles; innumerable brochures, catalogs, and manuals; and has presented almost 40 conference papers on topics as varied as Martin Luther King Jr.’s final speech, the original marketing campaigns for ibuprofen, and an analysis of Arab-Islamic values in the Persian Gulf. She is working on a recasting of Aristotle’s the Rhetoric in a form accessible to English as a Foreign Language readers.

Susan’s current passion is silent film and its connection to both the Golden Age of Hollywood film and to world film.

Find Susan on Twitter at @Cygnifyer.