University of California, Berkeley, Ph.D. in English

Duke University, B.A. in English and in African and Asian Languages and Literature

Principal Investigator, End Student Housing Insecurity Grant, IBHE (Illinois Board of Higher Education), $200K, awarded Nov. 2023

Named EIU Faculty Laureate 2019-2020

Recording of Faculty Laureate speech (starts 16:30, ends 25:30): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIR_DcjoeOM

Inducted into the national honors organization, Phi Beta Kappa, at Duke University (Beta Chapter of North Carolina), Dr. Park has served as the President of the PHI BETA KAPPA East Central Illinois Alumni Association since 2008.

Park's public humanities keynote address--"The Boy Who Lived: Harry Potter and the Culture of Death"--can be seen here.

Born near Los Angeles, and raised in Phoenix, Dr. Suzie Asha Park earned her Ph.D. in English at UC Berkeley and her B.A. in English and in African and Asian Languages and Literature at Duke University. Before teaching at EIU, Dr. Park taught as a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at UC Davis and worked as a technical writer at a software company in Silicon Valley. While her undergraduate interests included pre-med studies, English, and music, her passion for literature won out in the end. 

Her areas of teaching and research interest include British Romanticism, the novel, poetry, women writers, sentimental culture, literary theory, information theory, and the medical humanities. Her articles have appeared in journals including Nineteenth-Century Prose, Literature Compass, Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, European Romantic Review, and in the edited collection Recognizing the Romantic Novel: New Histories of British Fiction, 1780-1830.

She has been an NEH Fellow, Mellon Fellow, and participant in the National Humanities Center Summer Institute. She is currently at work on two book projects, titled Compulsory Narration: Resisting the Demand for Depth in an Age of Information, 1750-1850, and Preparing for Eventualities. Dr. Park's current research engages with the conundrum of mortality from literary and philosophical perspectives from the eighteenth century through today.

In 2015, Dr. Park was awarded the Provost's Undergraduate Research Mentor Award for the College of Arts and Humanities and the Rodney S. Ranes Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award for the university.

Elected to one of only five open at-large seats on the National Phi Beta Kappa Senate, Dr. Park serves the country's most prestigious honors society as a National Senator.