DIRECTORY LISTING

Susan Markens

Biography

I joined the Sociology Department at Lehman College in September 2007.  I am currently serving as Deputy Chair of the department.  Additionally, I’m affiliated with the Women’s Studies Program at Lehman, and am also Affiliated Faculty with the Sociology Department and Women’s and Gender Studies Programs at The Graduate Center.  Prior to arriving at Lehman I taught at Temple University, and have held Mellon and NIH post-doc positions at Rutgers University, Brandeis University and UCLA.  I received my Ph.D. in Sociology from UCLA, and my B.A. in Sociology from Brandeis University. 

My research focuses on the proliferation of reproductive practices and biomedical and genetic technologies as they shape and are shaped by ideologies of gender, race and class, notions of kinship relations, risk discourse, medicalization processes, and conceptions of health and illness.  My book, Surrogate Motherhood and the Politics of Reproduction, was published by University of California Press.  In this study, I explored how social actors and institutions came to define, and respond to, the “social problem” of surrogate motherhood in the late twentieth century.

Profile