Susan O'Neal Stryker is an American professor, author, filmmaker, and theorist whose work focuses on gender and human sexuality. She is currently an associate professor of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Arizona, and is the director of the university's Institute for LGBT Studies. She has served as a visiting professor at Harvard University, University of California, Santa Cruz, and Simon Fraser University. Stryker is an openly lesbian trans woman who has written extensively about transgenderism and queer culture.Stryker received a bachelor's degree in Letters from University of Oklahoma in 1983. She earned a Ph.D. in United States History at the University of California, Berkeley in 1992; the doctoral thesis she presented was Making Mormonism: A Critical and Historical Analysis of Cultural Formation. She began to transition from man to woman shortly after earning her doctorate. In 1994, her essay "My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix" became the first article to be published in a peer-reviewed academic journal by an openly transgender author.Stryker was later awarded a postdoctoral research fellowship in human sexuality studies at Stanford University, sponsored by the Social Science Research Council and the Ford Foundation. From 1999 to 2003, she was the executive director of the GLBT Historical Society.In 2007, the Monette-Horowitz Trust honored her for her anti-homophobia activism. KQED (TV), San Francisco's Public Broadcasting Service, honored her with a "Local Hero Award"; she also received a Community Vanguard Award from the Transgender Law Center.
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