Susan Lord, Ph.D., LICSW
Social Work Dept.
University of New Hampshire
Durham, NH 03824
Phone: 603-862-3150
Email: salord@unh.edu

Susan Lord is Assistant Professor in the Social Work Department at the University of New Hampshire where she strives to engage in collaborative learning/teaching processes in practice and family therapy courses in the MSW Program. Prior to her appointment at UNH, where she has worked since 1993, Susan held an appointment at Harvard Medical School where she taught family therapy courses from 1988-1993. She has had a private psychotherapy practice since 1980, and has worked in a number of inpatient and outpatient psychiatric settings.

 Susan trained at the Family Institute of Cambridge in the ‘80s and had the good fortune of having Harlene Anderson, Richard Chasin, Sallyann Roth and Kaethe Weingarten as some of her mentors there. She was thrilled to work with Sheila McNamee in her PhD program on an independent study and as a member of her dissertation committee. Susan also trained at the Jung Institute in Zurich, and has been a Syda Yoga devotee/meditator for more than 20 yrs.

Areas of special interest include integrating social constuctionist, family systems, and psychodynamic ideas and practices into trauma work, and the cultivation of mindfulness and spirituality in psychotherapy. Susan’s research focus is on examining aspects of categorization, labeling, power differentials and organized inequities of all kinds. She has conducted research on the culture of philanthropy and issues of social stratification and social justice, and her book Wealth and social responsibility: A study of philanthropy in southern New Hampshire and southern Maine was published in 2008. Also in 2008, her article “Trauma, revictimization and perpetration: Bearing witness, offering hope, embracing despair” was published in Psychoanalytic Social Work. “Meditative dialogue: Cultivating sacred space in psychotherapy- An intersubjective fourth?” is scheduled to be published in Smith College Studies in Social Work in 2009, and she is currently writing an invited chapter, on using meditative dialogue to engage with students in collaborative learning processes for the book Collaborative learning: Methodology, types of interactions, and techniques,slated for publication in 2009.