Susan Gal facts for kids

Susan Gal (born in 1949) is a special kind of professor at the University of Chicago. She teaches about Anthropology, which is the study of people and cultures. She also teaches about Linguistics, which is the study of language. Professor Gal has written many books and articles. Her work helps us understand how language, gender, and politics are connected, especially in Eastern Europe.

Learning and Her Job

Susan Gal went to Barnard College and earned her first degree in 1970. She studied psychology and anthropology there. Later, she got her Ph.D. (a very high degree) from the University of California, Berkeley in 1976.

She started teaching at Rutgers University in 1977. She worked there until 1994. After that, she moved to the University of Chicago. From 1999 to 2002, she was even in charge of the Anthropology Department there.

Special Awards and Recognitions

Professor Gal has received many important awards for her work. In 2002, she won the Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. This award helped her study how ideas about language and power changed in countries that used to be socialist.

She also received fellowships from groups like the SSRC-ACLS, Fulbright, and NIMH. These fellowships are like special grants that help smart people do their research.

In 2007, Susan Gal was chosen to be part of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. This is a group of very smart and important people in different fields. She is also on the team that helps decide what articles get published in a big science magazine called American Anthropologist.

What She Studies

Professor Gal's first book, published in 1979, was called Language Shift: Social Determinants of Linguistic Change in Bilingual Austria. In this book, she looked at a group of people in Austria who spoke Hungarian. She studied how their language changed over time. She showed that language changes not just because of big things like cities growing, but also because of how people's values and ideas change.

She also wrote a book with Gail Kligman called The Politics of Gender After Socialism (published in 2000). This book won an award in 2001. They also worked together on another book called Reproducing Gender: Politics, Publics, and Everyday Life after Socialism. These books explore how ideas about boys and girls, and men and women, are connected to big changes in politics and money. They looked at countries in Eastern Europe after the Soviet Union broke apart.