Suzanne Abel

Suzanne Abel serves as CLAS Outreach Advisor pro bono, assisting with public outreach under the Center's Title VI work. She is Academic Director, emerita, and consultant at Puente de la Costa Sur in Pescadero, CA; Senior Advisor to the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford; and Consulting Scholar with the Caste War Project of the University of Pennsylvania’s Cultural Heritage Center (Tihosuco, Quintana Roo, Mexico), where she is a museum consultant.

Suzanne received her B.A. in English from Harvard in 1971 and her M.A. in Anthropology from Brown in 1978; she also did graduate work at UC Berkeley in Anthropology. Prior to joining the Haas Center staff at Stanford in 1995, she was founding director of the Grace Hudson Museum in Ukiah, CA in the 1980s and 1990s, and a field archaeologist and ethnohistorian with the Museo Nacional de Costa Rica in the late 1970s and early 1980s. She also did field work in Honduras; Chiapas, Mexico; Peru; Rhode Island and California. Suzanne is a co-author of Between Continents/Between Seas: Precolumbian Art of Costa Rica (1981), The Archaeology of Pacific Nicaragua (1992), and Remember Your Relations: the Elsie Allen Baskets, Family & Friends (1996), among other publications.

For 15 years at the Haas Center, she served as a staff advisor to Stanford in Government and mentored many students headed for careers in the public and nonprofit sectors. Suzanne received the Lloyd M. Dinkelspiel Award for Distinctive Contributions to Undergraduate Education and the Margaret Ann Fidler Award for Distinguished Service in Student Affairs, both in 2011.