Office: Scobey Hall 001
Phone: (605) 688-4063
Mary.Oconnor@sdstate.edu

Major Areas: Twentieth Century British and Irish Literature, Creative Writing, Women's and Postcolonial Studies, Literature for Young People

Mary O'Connor was born in Wexford, Ireland, and grew up there and in London. She earned her Masters in Fine Arts in the Writing Program at Columbia University and her PhD in Modern British Literature at UCLA.

Her PhD work, while covering in depth the period from Late Victorian to the present in British and Irish Literature, found its focus in the work of Irish women poets in the latter half of the Twentieth Century, from a feminist and post-colonial perspective. She has published essays and presented papers on women writers as diverse as Margaret Drabble, Eavan Boland, and Mother Jones. Her main enthusiasms in her field are for the Modernists Virginia Woolf and James Joyce.

O'Connor's poems and short stories have appeared in in Metre, Jacaranda Review, New Irish Writing, Columbia, Contemplative Review, Midwest Poetry Review, Briarcliff Review, and other journals. She has won prizes for both short fiction and poetry. She is currently working on a poetry collection, Absolutely Fabulous, from which she read at the first Dakota Reader show in April 2001, in a program which was subsequently broadcast on SD Public Radio.

Teaching: Dr. O'Connor has taught at college level since 1977, principally in her two major areas of Victorian and Modern British Literature and Expository/Creative Writing. Because of her early experience in Elementary Education, she has also been lucky enough to teach at least one course a year in Literature for Young People. Post-colonial, class, and gender issues are never far from her attention in teaching both literature and writing. She sees increased interest in and focus on interdisciplinary/cultural studies courses in British Literature in the future, and has participated as a guest lecturer in one such course at the University of Kent in Canterbury during her sabbatical year, 2000-2001. Her courses in the future will show the influence of that experience, and of the burgeoning campus capability in web technology.

Her grants and awards include the Woolrich Memorial Scholarship from Columbia University School of the Arts, the Jean Stone Fellowship from the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, the F.O. Butler Award for Excellence in Research from SDSU, a San Francisco Foundation Grant for the study of German women writers post-WW II, two residencies at Ragdale Writers' Colony, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, the Carole Elzer Award and the Fred Weld Herman Award at UCLA from the Academy of American Poets.