Scholarship and Activism on Mothering-Motherhood
Andrea O'Reilly, PhD, Associate Professor in the School of Women's Studies at York University is co-editor/editor of thirteen books on Motherhood: Redefining Motherhood: Changing Identities and Patterns (Second Story Press, 1998), Mothers and Daughters: Connection, Empowerment and Transformation (Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), Mothers and Sons: Feminism, Masculinity and the Struggle to Raise our Sons (Routledge Press 2001), From Motherhood to Mothering: The Legacy of Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born (SUNY, 2004), Mother Outlaws: Theories and Practices of Empowered Mothering (Women's Press, 2004), Mother Matters: Mothering as Discourse and Practice (ARM Press, 2004), Motherhood: Power and Oppression (Women's Press, 2005), You Can Get There From Here: 25 Years of Bridging Courses for Women at York University (School of Women's Studies, York University, 2006), Maternal Theory: Essential Readings (Demeter Press, 2007), Feminist Mothering (SUNY, 2008), Maternal Thinking Philosophy, Politics, Practice (Demeter Press, 2009), From Personal to Political: Towards a New Theory of Maternal Narrative With Silvia Caporale-Bizzini (Susquehanna University Press, 2009) and Textual Mothers/ Maternal Texts: Motherhood in Contemporary Women's Literatures with Elizabeth Podnieks (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2010). Her forthcoming books include Twenty-first-Century Motherhood: Experience, Identity, Policy, Agency (Columbia University Press, August 2010). She is currently completing The Palin Factor: Political Mothers and Public Motherhood in the 21st Century (Demeter Press, 2010), Being and Thinking as an Academic Mother: Narrative and Theory (Demeter Press, 2011), Mothering a Movement (Demeter Press, 2011) and writing a monograph on being a mother in the academe. See her recent interview: Mothers on the tenure track.
Andrea O'Reilly is editor of the first ever encyclopedia on Motherhood. The 3 volume, 706 entry, 1544 page encyclopedia will be published by Sage Press, in 2010.
O'Reilly is author of Toni Morrison and Motherhood: A Politics of the Heart, (SUNY, 2004) and Rocking the Cradle: Thoughts on Motherhood, Feminism, and the Possibility of Empowered Mothering (Demeter Press, 2006).
In 1991 she designed the first university course on Motherhood in Canada. O'Reilly is founder and director of The Association for Research on Mothering, (ARM). Founded in 1998, ARM is the first feminist research association on the topic of mothering-motherhood and has more than 500 members worldwide. As well, Dr. O’Reilly is founder and editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering, the first, and still only, scholarly journal on motherhood. Both ARM and its journal are recognized worldwide as the leading research centre/journal on Motherhood. In 2005 she launched Demeter Press, the first feminist press on motherhood. She is founder and director of “Mother Outlaws,” a feminist mother group and co-founder of the Museum of Motherhood and the International Mothers Network.
In the last 12 years she has received sixteen Social Science Humanities Research Council of Canada grants including eleven SSHRCC conference grants, two (three year) SSHRCC journal grants, a SSHRCC IOF grant and two (three year) SSHRCC standard grants. Her current research projects include a three year SSHRCC funded research project on “Being a Mother in the Academe” and another SSHRCC funded project on “Mother Centres, Feminist Pedagogy, and Young Motherhood: Creating Empowerment Programming for Young Mothers”. She has published fifty chapters and articles in leading journals and collections and has presented her research at seventy-plus international conferences and universities in 23 countries and 26 states including being a keynote speaker at conferences in Canada, UK, Australia, South Africa, Israel, Ireland, Germany and the United States. In 2006 she was a keynote speaker at the annual NWSA Conference (the largest Women’s Studies organization in the world). Likewise, she has given numerous talks at universities across North America and Europe and has been interviewed widely on the topic of motherhood including appearances on “The Agenda,” “More to Life,” “Planet Parent,” “Canadian Living Television,” “Chatelaine Magazine,” “Sex TV,” “The Toronto Star,” “The National Post,” “The Globe and Mail,” "Macleans," "Newsweek," "Reader's Digest," "The Philadelphia Inquirer," "The Hamilton Spectator" and “CBC Radio".
In November 2008 Andrea O'Reilly was at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute, Concordia University under the Lillian Robinson Fellowship. Click here to find out more: http://artsandscience1.concordia.ca/wsdb/lrobinsonscholars
In 1998, she was the recipient of the University wide "Teacher of the Year" award at York University, in 2007 the Atkinson Dean’s award for “Outstanding Research” and in 2009 was again the recipient of York's Univeristy Wide "Teacher of the Year" award in the senior tenured facutly cateogry.
She and her common-law spouse are the parents of three children, a son, 25 and two daughters, 23 and 20.