Susan Ackerman joined the Religion Department in 1990 after teaching at the University of Arizona and at Winthrop College in South Carolina. She is a specialist in the religion of ancient Israel and the religions of Israel's neighbors (Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Canaan), an interest she first developed as an undergraduate religion major at Dartmouth (A.B., 1980) and continued to explore in graduate school at Harvard (M.T.S., 1982; Ph.D., 1987).

Her publications include multiple articles and six books, Under Every Green Tree: Popular Religion in Sixth-Century Judah (Scholars Press, 1992); Warrior, Dancer, Seductress, Queen: Women in Judges and Biblical Israel (Doubleday, 1998); When Heroes Love: The Ambiguity of Eros in the Stories of Gilgamesh and David (Columbia University Press, 2005); Women and the Religion of Ancient Israel (Yale University Press, 2022); Gods, Goddesses, and the Women Who Serve Them (Eerdmans, 2022); and Maturity, Marriage, Motherhood, and Mortality: Women's Life-Cycle Rituals in Ancient Israel (Oxford University Press, 2025).

Ackerman retired from the Dartmouth faculty in 2024.