Susan Hollis

As a recently retired faculty mentor, I am engaged in reading, writing, and research in my field of Egyptology and the rest and the Ancient Near East as my "forthcoming" notes in publications show. Beyond that I am involved in playing five different recorders in my local chapter of the American Recorder Society as well as taking occasional trips to scuba dive in different places in the world. Reading for pleasure also is part of my life. 

I've lived in different parts of the country, all of them related to education. Initialliy, after completing my undergraduate degree at the "normal" age though with a term out working in a NYC hospital chemistry laboratory, I got married and had one child and adopted another. When I went to grad school, the marriage ended, and I began to teach at the college level once I passed my general examinations and have managed to teach ever since. I particularly liked working with adult students and brought to that my experiences as a single mother with two young children while going to grad school. I also was challenged as an older newly minted Ph.D. with getting a teaching role and took my many years of experiences as a volunteer, many in leadership roles, to work as an educational administrator, which in time brought me to Empire State College as the Dean for the Central New York Center (Syracuse) from which I graduated with great joy to the role of faculty mentor at the Genesee Valley Center and in time with the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program in the School for Graduate Studies (though I never totally gave up my undergraduate work). So now, many years after my techically appropriate retirement age, I am in retirement, missing my student work but enjoying greatly the opportunity to contribute to my academic field with publications and engaging younger scholars in the handbook I'm editing.