Erin O'Connor
Assistant Teaching Professor
Erin E. O’Connor, Ph.D., is a sociologist and ethnographer of embodied knowledge who traces how skilled, bodily labor connects to the deep time of Earth’s formation and geology, moving from the glassblower’s hands to the mines and minerals of the medium’s making. She is Faculty in Sociology and Anthropology at Northeastern University-New York City, following seventeen years as Associate Professor and chair at Marymount Manhattan College. Recognized for her hands-on, experiential, longitudinal fieldwork, she explores the human condition through the embodied and material dynamics of becoming a studio glassblower in her monograph, Fire Craft: Art, Body, and World among Glassblowers (Columbia University Press, 2025). In 2023, she received the Rakow Grant for Glass Research at the Corning Museum of Glass, launching her current book project, The Middle Mineral & the Mine: A Geoanthropology of Studio Glass. Her writing appears in peer-reviewed journals and public periodicals.
2026 Fire Craft selected as a “Nerdection Must Read” and one of the “10 Best Books About Craft, Making, and Handmade Art,” Book Nerdection.
2026 Fulbright Fellowship Finalist. Fulbright-University of Graz Visiting Professor in Humanities, University of Graz, Graz, Austria.
2025 Marymount Manhattan College Faculty Scholarship Award.
2024 Marymount Manhattan College Faculty Scholarship Award.
2023 Rakow Grant for Glass Research, Corning Museum of Glass.
2014 Carnegie Mellon Advanced Interdisciplinary Perspective Teaching Enhancement Grant, Fall.
2014 Carnegie Mellon Advanced Interdisciplinary Perspective Teaching Enhancement Grant, Spring.
Books
O’Connor, Erin E. 2025. Fire Craft: Art, Body, and World among Glassblowers. Columbia University Press.
Peer-Reviewed Articles
O’Connor, Erin E. 2025. “Hotshop: Placing the Genesis of American Studio Glassblowing.” Canadian Review of American Studies 55 (1): 68–100.
O’Connor, Erin E. 2024. “From Furnace to Mine: An Ethnomineralogy of the Early Studio-Glass Movement.” West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 31 (1): 83–102.
O’Connor, Erin E. 2017. “Touching Tacit Knowledge: Handwork as Ethnographic Method in Glassblowing.” Qualitative Research 17 (2): 217–230.
O’Connor, Erin E., D. Rhoten, and E. Hackett. 2009. “The Act of Collaborative Creation and the Art of Integrative Creativity: Originality, Disciplinarity, and Interdisciplinarity in Science.” Thesis Eleven 96 (1): 83–108.
O’Connor, Erin E. 2007. “The Centripetal Force of Expression: Drawing Embodied Histories into Glassblowing.” Qualitative Sociology Review 3 (3): 113–134.
O’Connor, Erin E. 2006. “Glassblowing Tools: Extending the Body towards Practical Knowledge and Informing a Social World.” Qualitative Sociology 29 (2): 177–193.
O’Connor, Erin E. 2005. “Embodied Knowledge: Meaning and the Struggle towards Proficiency in Glassblowing.” Ethnography 6 (2): 183–204.
Book Chapters
O’Connor, Erin E. 2027. “Embodied Knowledge in Glassblowing: Meaning and the Struggle towards Proficiency.” In The Glass Reader, edited by K. Petrie and J. Sarmiento. Bloomsbury Academic.
O’Connor, Erin E. 2024. “Becoming with Glass: Medium and Materiality in Embodied Knowledge.” In Craft and Design Practice from an Embodied Perspective, edited by C. Groth and N. Nimkulrat, 40–51. Routledge.
O’Connor, Erin E. 2023. “Materia Erotica: Making-Love among Glassblowers.” In Leaving the Field: Methodological Insights from Ethnographic Exits, edited by R. Smith and S. Delamont, 86–98. Manchester University Press.
O’Connor, Erin E., and S. Peck. 2016. “The Prototype: Problem Work in the Relationship between Designer, Artist, and Gaffer in Glassblowing.” In Craftwork as Problem Solving: Ethnographic Studies of Design and Making, edited by T. H. J. Marchand, 33–49. Routledge.
O’Connor, Erin E. 2015. “Inter- to Intracorporeality: The Haptic Hotshop Heat of a Glassblowing Studio.” In Studio Studies: Ethnographies of Creative Production, edited by I. Farias and A. Wilkie, 105–119. Routledge.
O’Connor, Erin E. 2012. “Saber hecho carne: la experiencia del sentido y la búsqueda de expertise en el soplado de vidrio.” In Hacia una nueva sociología cultural: mapas, dramas, actos y prácticas, edited by C. E. Benzecry, 40–51. Universidad Nacional de Quilmes.
O’Connor, Erin E. 2007. “Hot Glass: The Calorific Imagination of Practice in Glassblowing.” In Practicing Culture: Taking Culture Seriously, edited by C. Calhoun and R. Sennett, 57–81. Routledge.
O’Connor, Erin E. 2007. “Embodied Knowledge in Glassblowing: The Experience of Meaning and the Struggle towards Proficiency.” In Embodying Sociology: Retrospect, Progress and Prospects, edited by C. Shilling, 126–141. Wiley-Blackwell.
Published Periodicals
O’Connor, Erin E. 2026. “Mentorship, Mêtis, and Mixing.” GEEX Journal, vol. 2. Glass Education Exchange. https://geex.glass/resources/journal/.
O’Connor, Erin E. 2025. “Vitrifying America.” Glass Quarterly, no. 179 (Summer 2025). https://urbanglass.org/glass/issue/summer-2025.
O’Connor, Erin E. 2024. “Hurricane Helene’s Urgent Message about the Arts and Global Mining.” Hyperallergic, November 13, 2024. https://hyperallergic.com/hurricane-helene-was-a-wake-up-call-for-glass-artists/.
Fellow, Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland | 2025–present
Member, American Anthropological Association | 2024–present
Advisory Board, Mathematizing in Motion, SOAS, University of London | 2024–present
Member, American Sociological Association | 2009–present
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Education
Ph.D. Sociology, 2009
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Contact
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Address
200 Suite, Carson Hall
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Office Hours
Mondays, 1:30-2:30PM
Peoples and Cultures
ANTH 1101
Surveys basic concepts in cultural anthropology by looking at a range of societies and the issues they face in a globalizing world. Examines the manner in which cultures adapt to, reject, or modify all of the changes they face. These changes impact everything from traditional family structure, to religion, gender, all the way to patterns of joking and concepts of beauty the world over.
