Susan E. Bell, Ph.D.

Susan joined the faculty of Bowdoin College, in 1983, after completing doctoral work in Sociology at Brandeis University and postdoctoral work in the Department of Psychiatry (Massachusetts Mental Health Center) at Harvard Medical School. Her courses cover the sociology of health and illness, chronic illness and disability, global health, and constructions of the body. Since 2000, she has also worked with the Maine Humanities Council to develop and lead six-month seminars in literature and medicine at hospitals and health centers in Maine. She is on the editorial board of Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine, and is editorial advisor for Sociology of Health & Illness.

Her current line of research explores works of art produced since the late 20th century by women who have had cancer. One set of questions asks what types of “work” these works of art do—for the artists, for viewers, for disease regimes, for social movements, for survival strategies—in/after treatments for cancer. She also considers how the artists address dilemmas of visibility as they move from the outside in and the inside out of their gendered bodies. Susan recently completed a collaborative project that explores the role of ’artworks’ produced by women with breast cancer in the context of breast cancer activism, “Artworks, collective experience, and claims for social justice: the case of women living with breast cancer,” with Alan Radley, Sociology of Health & Illness 29(3):366-390, 2007.

Another set of questions builds on earlier narrative studies of illness, and explores works of art as narratives, as in “Photo images: Jo Spence’s narratives of living with illness.” health, 6(1): 5-30, 2002. How can visual narratives deepen our sociological understandings of the ways individual experiences are shaped by the broader contexts in which they live, and in turn what possibilities for emancipation do they suggest? Her publications about this topic have given detailed attention to the works of conceptual artist Mary Kelly tracing her experiences of becoming a mother in the 1970s, photographer Jo Spence documenting her life with breast cancer from 1982-1992, and Martha Hall, making sense by making artist’s books after her diagnosis of breast cancer in 1989 until her death in 2003.

Susan recently completed a book manuscript, DES Daughters, Embodied Knowledge, and the Transformation of Women’s Health Politics in the Late Twentieth Century, which is currently under review.

All of these projects continue her longstanding scholarly interest and participation in women’s health activism; the production, contestation, and circulation of knowledges; and a recent turn to its performative aspects, as in “Vaginal politics: Tensions and possibilities in The Vagina Monologues,” with Susan M. Reverby, Women’s Studies International Forum, 28(5):430-444, 2005.