We are deeply saddened to share that our colleague Susan Seizer passed away on the evening of September 29, after a brief illness. Susan was a much-beloved member of the Department of Anthropology, retiring in 2021.
Susan was a cultural anthropologist who specialized in performance studies and conducted long term ethnographic fieldwork in Tamil Nadu in South India. Her research = provided a behind the scenes look at the lives of Special Drama actors, an all-night popular theater genre typically performed by lower-class artists on the margins of society. The book that she wrote, Stigmas on the Tamil Stage: An Ethnography of Special Drama Artists in South India focused on how social prejudices operated in this community. It won the prestigious A.K. Coomarawasamy Prize by the Association for Asian Studies in 2007. The intertwined issues of humor, laughter, and stigma would go on to infuse Susan’s subsequent major project – an ethnography of road comics in the Midwestern United States. To bring the research alive and make it accessible to a range of audiences, she made the decision to produce a documentary film – bucking the academic tendency to view print culture as the primary measure of success. Her 2012 film Road Comics: Big Work on Small Stages follows the road lives of three stand-up comics working in the Midwest. In all her work, Susan explored the positionality and role of the ethnographer, and the ways that class, race, sexual orientation, and gender impact people’s experiences in the field. At IU, she organized the symposium “Love, Money and Incommensurability,” which brought together an international group of scholars to explore the dynamic between goals of reciprocity in community-ethnographer relationships and the realities of geopolitical and social asymmetry that almost invariably intervene.
Susan earned her BA in English at Barnard College and then completed her MA and PhD in Anthropology at the University Chicago. Prior to becoming an anthropologist, Susan was a dancer, actor, and circus performer. In her first faculty position, Susan was chair of the Anthropology and Gender and Women’s Studies at Scripps College in Claremont, California. She came to IU in 2007 as a faculty member in the Department of Communication and Culture. When that department was dissolved, she and four other colleagues transferred into the Department of Anthropology. As part of this move, she was a major contributor to and co-founder of the department’s thematic cluster focused on Culture, Media and Performance, affectionately known as CaMP Anthropology.
Susan was diagnosed with MS in 1994, yet she never let it hold her back. She was a social and political activist and was heavily involved in wider Bloomington community. I often saw Susan staffing tables at various community events such as PrideFest. Recently, her efforts focused on registering new voters – especially student voters at IU – and representing Mobility Aids Lending Library (MALL), a “disabled-run nonprofit organization that provides free donated and gently used medical and mobility devices, including canes, scooters, walkers, and wheelchairs to people who need them.”
Susan leaves behind beloved family members including her wife Catherine Brennan and sons Keith (an IU Class of 2026 Anthropology BA alum!) and Forrest, extended family across the U.S. and Australia, and a vast network of friends. A funeral will be held on Friday October 2nd, at 11 am at Congregation Beth Shalom in Bloomington.
The College of Arts