About

Anna Madelyn Hennessey, PhD

I am a writer, scholar, 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 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 current writing projects include two chapters for Palgrave Macmillan’s upcoming Handbook on the Philosophy of Birth (1. the Aesthetics of Birth and 2. the Social Ontology of Birth); a new book on the use of mental imagery and visualization for birth; a journal article on natality as a philosophy of rebirth, and a journal article on material culture and Vietnamese Buddhism in San Francisco.

My academic background is in the history of religions with a focus on Chinese philosophy, art, and religion (PhD, UC Santa Barbara), art history (MA, UC Santa Barbara) and philosophy and language (BA, double major, New York University). Trained in interdisciplinary and comparative work, I also write about Chinese art and religion, Catalan culture, philosophy and art. Locally, I have written about issues of race and class in San Francisco, as well as art and culture of the San Francisco Bay Area.

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 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 now on the steering committee of the Motherhood and Religion unit for the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and am an associate editor for Sophia: International Journal of Philosophy and Traditions. I have worked on various editorial teams since 2011.

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