Dr. Susan Myers-Shirk

Professor
Director, History Department General Education

CONTACT
E-mail: susan.myers-shirk@mtsu.edu
Phone: (615) 898-2386
Office Location: Peck Hall Room 282
MTSU Box 23
Murfreesboro, TN 37132
Personal website: http://mtsuculturalhistory.wordpress.com/

FIELDS: U.S. Cultural and Intellectual History

BIOGRAPHY: : My research and teaching interests intersect in the history of values. I teach courses about how Americans have made moral and aesthetic choices, offering topics courses on the history of cultural rebellion, alternative spirituality, and road culture, as well as a course on how cultural hierarchies are created. I have a particular weakness for interdisciplinary approaches. My current research unites all of my interests—psychology (consciousness), spirituality, road culture (pilgrimage), environmentalism, landscape, and geography—in a new project tentatively titled "Journeys and Landscapes: A Spiritual Geography of Post-Christian America."

UNDERGRADUATE COURSES TAUGHT:

• History 2010, Survey United States History I
• History 2020, Survey United States History II
• History 4740, U.S. Cultural and Intellectual History
• History 3040 Topics in U. S. Cultural History; topics include history of the counterculture, post-1965 alternative spirituality, and road culture

GRADUATE COURSES TAUGHT:

• History 6010, Historiography
• History 6020, Historical Research Methods
• History 6105, Seminar: Research in American History

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

Myers-Shirk, Susan. Helping the Good Shepherd: Pastoral Counselors in a Psychotherapeutic Culture, 1925-1975. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

SELECTED AWARDS:

MTSU Outstanding Achievement in Instructional Technology Award, 2007-2008

Visiting Fellow, Spring 1998, Center for the Study of American Religion, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ

Faculty Fellow, 1997-1998, Pew Program in Religion and American History, Yale University, New Haven, CT

EDUCATION:

Ph.D., Penn State, 1994

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