Scholarship and Activism on Mothering-Motherhood
Andrea O'Reilly, PhD, Associate Professor in the School of Women's Studies at York University is the founder and director of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement. The Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (MIRCI) is the newly launched feminist scholarly and activist organization on mothering-motherhood, developed from the former Association for Research on Mothering at York University (1998-2010). The initiative houses the Journal of the Motherhood Initiative (formerly The Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering), Mother Outlaws, The International Mothers and Mothering Network (formerly IMN), Young Mothers and Empowerment Forum, The Motherhood Studies Forum and is partnered with Demeter Press.
Andrea is co-editor/editor of fourteen 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), Textual Mothers/ Maternal Texts: Motherhood in Contemporary Women's Literatures with Elizabeth Podnieks (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2010) and Twenty-first-Century Motherhood: Experience, Identity, Policy, Agency (Columbia University Press, August 2010). She is currently completing 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 was 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.
In the last 12 years she has received eighteen 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, 26 and two daughters, 24 and 21.