Susan A. Kaplan

Susan Kaplan is a professor of anthropology and director of the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum and Arctic Studies Center at Bowdoin College. She is an Arctic anthropologist and archaeologist. Her work covers three areas of northern research. She studies prehistoric and historic Inuit responses to environmental change and contact with the West using archaeology, ethnohistory, visual anthropology, and paleoenvironmental data. Most of that work has taken place in northern Labrador, Canada. She studies the history of Arctic exploration using many of the same investigative tools, and that work has taken her to Ellesmere Island, Labrador, and Newfoundland and into many archives. Finally, she studies material culture and uses museum collections to develop exhibitions for the public and to reach out to the northern communities from which artifacts were collected and photographs and films were taken.