Erin E. O?Connor

Dr. Erin E. O’Connor is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Marymount Manhattan College in New York City and the author of Fire Craft: Art, Body, and World among Glassblowers (Columbia University Press, 2025). She is renowned within the international community of sociologists and anthropologists for her ground-breaking studies of glassblowing, especially of embodied knowledge and skill. As a recipient of the 2023 Rakow Grant for Glass Research, Dr. O’Connor launched her second book project, tentatively titled, The Middle Mineral & the Mine: an Ethnogeology of Studio Glass. This research investigates the reciprocity of human creativity and geology in the material life of studio glass. Taking glass batch, color, and cullet as her foci, she maps a dynamic symgeology of studio glass, namely the co-becoming of human glassblowers and the non-human: mines, minerals, and global supply chains. Her research specializes in glass, the arts, culture, the body, knowledge, and the environment.