Scholars Program
About the Scholars Program
Student-Scholar Partnership Program (SSP)
Arts Program
swilson547@brandeis.edu
Women's History; Medical History; Biography
M.A., Tufts University
B.A., Tufts University
www.susanwilsonphoto.com
www.melodicvision.com
WSRC > Scholars Program > Susan Wilson
Susan Wilson
Susan Wilson is an award-winning photographer, author, multimedia artist, and public historian whose stories and images about the arts, entertainment, history, and culture regularly appeared in the Boston Globe from 1978 to 1996. In 1994, she began writing and photographing books on Boston history.
Susan has served as the official House Historian of the Omni Parker House (established 1855) since 2012. She has long been a consultant to and member of a variety of historic organizations in Boston, including The Boston Women's Heritage Trail, Forest Hills Educational Trust, The Dimock Center, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Old South Association, the Boston Athenaeum, The Freedom Trail Foundation, Boston National Historical Park, Boston By Foot, the Boston History and Innovation Collaborative, and the City of Boston (for whom she wrote all the historic kiosk signage on Boston Common).
With her broad array of contemporary and historic images, and a slew of wonderful stories, Susan has become a popular speaker in area lecture halls, libraries, historic sites, and classrooms, as well as on both TV and radio. She is well known for her animated and informative slide lectures on cultural and historic topics, which are featured on the WGBH Forum Network.
My project is researching and writing a biography, Women and Children First: The Remarkable Life of Dr. Susan Dimock. To her contemporaries in Boston of the 1870s, Dimock was known as a strong, selfless pioneer in American medicine — among the first group of physicians to provide professional health care by, and for, women, and one of the finest surgeons in Massachusetts. Though her name lives on in the Dimock Center in Roxbury, her history has been largely lost, in part because she died in a shipwreck at the age of 28.
Representative Publications
Heaven, By Hotel Standards: The History of the Omni Parker House (Omni Hotels, 2014).
Boston Sites and Insights: An Essential Guide to Historic Landmarks In and Around Boston (Beacon Press, revised and updated edition, 2004).
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