Penn State prof to examine important role of chicken during YCP talk

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

            YORK, Pa. – A Penn State professor will examine the chicken as an object of biomedical, scientific, literary and popular cultural construction in the 20th and 21st centuries during an April 16 talk at York College of Pennsylvania.  Susan Squier’s presentation, “Liminal Lives and Liminal Livestock,” will begin at 7 p.m. in Room 218 of the Humanities Center and is open to the public free of charge.

            Squier will look at children's books, film, short stories and art, as well as science and medicine, to show how the chicken has been an important figure in shaping the human understanding of our own nature, because of its importance to embryology and because of the impact of agricultural modernization on human medicine. From poultry breeding to chicken films and stories, Squier’s work suggests that the current biomedical and biotechnological intervention into human life is based on the agricultural intervention into livestock lives, with special focus on the agricultural reshaping of chickens.           

            Squier received her education at Princeton University and Stanford University. She is Brill Professor of Women's Studies and English at The Pennsylvania State University, where she directs the Science, Medicine, Technology in Culture program. Her research interests include cultural studies of science and medicine, feminist theory and modernism. Among her many publications are “Babies in Bottles: Twentieth Century Visions of Reproductive Technology;” “Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation;” “Playing Dolly: Technocultural Formations, Fantasies, and Fictions of Assisted Reproduction;” and “Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedicine.”

            Squier was scholar-in-residence at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study and Conference Center; Visiting Distinguished Fellow, LaTrobe University, Melbourne, Australia; and Fulbright Senior Research Scholar, Melbourne, Australia. She is editorial board member of the Journal of Medical Humanities, and executive board member and past president of the Society for Literature and Science.

            Located in southcentral Pennsylvania, York College offers more than 50 baccalaureate majors in professional programs, the sciences and humanities to its 4,600 undergraduate students. The College also offers master's programs in business, education and nursing. A center of affordable academic excellence, York is dedicated to the intellectual, professional and social growth of its students. The College helps them develop a concrete plan to attain academic growth and career success; encourages them to try in the “real world” what they learn in the classroom; and prepares them to be professionals regardless of the career they pursue.

# # #