Susan Caldwell

Dr. Susan Caldwell was Co-Director of the IIRE from July 2000 to July 2004. Some of you will already know Dr. Caldwell from her role as co-organizer of the Women's Session in 1997 with Penelope Duggan and Tatau Godinho. She moved to Amsterdam from her home in Montreal, Quebec, where she was working as a teacher and active on the left and returned there after completing her planned four-year term as Co-Director.

After earning a master's degree in psychology in the 1970s, Dr. Caldwell has recently completed an interdisciplinary doctorate, with a dissertation looking at the Allied political re-education programmes for German prisoners of war in WWII as a means to investigate the assumptions underlying education and propaganda. Her activist background is in feminist and union work. Her feminist activities have ranged from organizing user-controlled day care centres to abortion rights, women in unions (both in terms of equal pay and self-organization). International solidarity with the World Women's March 2000 was one of her most recent projects.

She has taught at the college level for the last 20 years and brought that teaching and curriculum development experience with her to the Institute. During those years she taught within the women's studies, law and society, European Studies and North-South studies programmes at her college. Both the European and North-South studies include a travel component, to Denmark and Nicaragua respectively. She had also been teaching a course on the Internet for the State University of New York for the last five years.

While she was Co-Director, Dr. Caldwell worked on developing the feminist aspect of our work at the IIRE and on putting us on the Internet. She plans to continue that work as a Fellow.