Susan G. Strauss

Susan Strauss is impassioned by language, literacy, imagery, and discourse. She has studied Spanish, French, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Amharic, German, Yiddish, and Quechua, and is fascinated by the ways in which these various systems of language combine to express tense and aspect, number, gender, shape, color, sensory perception, stance, opinion, affect, and emotion. She teaches courses at Penn State in Discourse Analysis, Discourse Functional Grammar (English and other languages), Linguistic Anthropology, Second Language Writing, and Pedagogical Approaches to L2 Speaking/Listening.

Since 2012, she has been the mother of six school-aged children, all adopted from Ethiopia. Together they have been building foundations of literacy as “social cognition,” foundations through which words and worlds connect to form new understandings about people and freedom, education and respect; about science, social studies, history, literature, and art.

She is currently working on a new book with Parastou Feiz, Cal State San Bernardino, and Xuehua Xiang, University of Illinois at Chicago, also to be published by Routledge, on the topic of discourse functional grammar. She is also authoring a book on her adoption story, detailing the institutional challenges of the adoption process itself and sharing the absolute joy, wonder, and awe of being a mother to six utterly amazing children.