About

Anna Madelyn Hennessey, PhD

I am a writer, scholar, editor and artist based in San Francisco, CA, and have published widely for academic and wider audiences. Much of my writing over the past fifteen years, which includes a book (Imagery, Ritual and Birth), is devoted to the topic of birth, rebirth, and social ontology in philosophy, art, and the humanities. I am also the principal artist of the Rebirth Tunnel Immersive Art Installation project, which has received grants from the Henry Luce Foundation and the American Academy of Religion.

My academic background is in Religious Studies with specialization in Chinese philosophy and religion (PhD, UC Santa Barbara), Art History with a focus on critical theory (MA, UC Santa Barbara) and Philosophy and Language (BA, double major, New York University). My writing is inclusive of Western philosophical traditions, including analytic philosophy, as well as Nonwestern approaches to philosophy, especially those found in Chinese philosophy.

I am the Founder and Director of the Society for the Study of Pregnancy and Birth (SSPRB), an intellectual hub for scholars in the arts, humanities, and social sciences who research pregnancy and birth in their fields, and also a Visiting Research Scholar at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley (2021-Present). Over the years, I have taught philosophy and humanities classes in the University of California and California State University systems. Previously, I researched as a visiting scholar with both UC Berkeley’s Philosophy Department (2015-2018) and its Center for the Study of Religion (2019-2021), as well as at the Institute of Buddhist Studies in Berkeley (2018-2019).

A Past President of the American Academy of Religion, Western Region (AAR/WR), I am also on the editorial team and an associate editor for Sophia: International Journal of Philosophy and Traditions. Over the years, I have worked extensively on various editorial teams and have edited academic and nonacademic work on as a freelance editor.

A longtime San Franciscan, I play the fiddle as part of an Irish music group in the city. My husband Toni and I live in the Lower Haight and are raising our two children, Kieran and Montserrat. We are occasionally in Catalonia, which is where Toni is from and his family lives, and are also members of San Francisco’s United Irish Cultural Center (UICC), which is our connection to my Irish American heritage. We live our lives close to the cultures of Ireland and Catalonia.

You can email me at: amhennessey at gmail dot com. I have a background in language acquisition and am comfortable corresponding in Catalan, Chinese, French, Italian and Spanish.

Anna Hennessey, PhD