Susan Grayzel
History, Cultures, and Ideas
Professor
Contact Information
Office Location: Logan (MAIN 323J)Phone: +1 435 797 4175
Email: s.grayzel@usu.edu
Additional Information:
Educational Background
PhD, History, (Late Modern Europe), University of California at Berkeley, 1994
MA, History, (Late Modern Euruope), University of California at Berkeley, 1989
BA, History & Literature, Harvard University, 1986
Biography
Susan R. Grayzel teaches courses in modern European history, the cultural history of total war, and gender and women's history. Her books include Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War (UNC Press, 1999); awarded the British Council Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies in 2000; Women and the First World War (2002, 2nd edition Routledge 2024); At Home and Under Fire: Air Raids and Culture in Britain from the Great War to the Blitz (Cambridge, 2012); The First World War: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford St Martins, 2012, 2nd Edition, 2021); and the co-edited volume Gender and the Great War (Oxford, 2017) with colleague Tammy Proctor. Her latest book, The Age of the Gas Mask: How British Civilians Faced the Terrors of Total War (Cambridge, 2022), uses one material object—the civilian gas mask—to explore how the state and individuals responded to the first weapons of mass destruction.
Along with USU Assistant Professor of Anthropology Molly Cannon, she is the co-director of the Bringing War Home Project: Object Stories, Memory, and Modern War, initially funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities Dialogues on the Experience War in 2021-24 (https://www.usu.edu/mountainwest/bringing-war-home/); they co-teach a Community Engaged Learning class on Objects of War that provides students with the opportunity to collect and preserve objects and stories about the things carried to and from the sites of armed conflict. She also serves on the faculty advisory board for the Heravi Peace Institute and will be an Honors Faculty Fellow in autumn 2025.
In addition to ongoing, collaborative research on gender, citizenship, and civil defense in twentieth-century Britain and its empire with Prof. Lucy Noakes (University of Essex UK), she is starting a new project on experiences of pregnancy during the Second World War along with other research on sexual violence and international law; and the intersections among gender, emotions, and wartime technology.