Ruth O'Brien

For Blogs see RuthOBrien.org

Ruth O’Brien writes about politics. Her book out this May Out of Many, One: Obama and the Third American Political Tradition (University of Chicago). “A truly original book, Out of Many One will enrage and persuade” writes Columbia J-School’s Distinguished Professor & journalist Thomas Byrnes Edsall in the foreword. She keynoted an earlier incarnation of this book at Copenhagen Business School’s One Year Out.

O’Brien also wrote: Bodies in Revolt, Gender, Disability and a Workplace Ethic of Care as well as Crippled Justice: The History of Modern Disability Policy (University of Chicago Press), the latter received an honorable mention from Gustavus Meyers Center for the Study of Human Rights and Bigotry. Before that O’Brien wrote Workers’ Paradox: The Republican Origins of the New Deal Labor Policy, 1886-1935. Her emphasis in a Ph.D. specialization she started where she teaches at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York stems from two books she edited entitled: Telling Stories Out of Court: Narratives about Women and the Workplace; and also Voices from the Edge: Narratives about the Americans with Disabilities Act. Voices from the Edge earned O’Brien and the contributors to this unique book (that uses fiction and creative non-fiction to embody a law) an honorable mention from the Gustavus Meyers Center for the Study of Human Rights and Bigotry, as well as being featured for ADA celebrating the 20th anniversary of the law’s passage at the NYPL. O’Brien has alos been an adjunct affiliated scholar with the Center for American Progress in Washington D.C., now headed by Neera Tanden.

O’Brien is a Princeton University Press book series editor for The Public Square, including books by Anne Norton, Jill Lepore, Martha Nussbaum, Joan Wallach Scott, Andrei Codescru, David Marquand, Jeff Madrick, and Andrei Markovits. The first 8 Public Square books earned a dozen awards, so far. The latest, On the Muslim Question was just published in February so it is too early to tell.

O’Brien lives with her second husband Frederic in 2 houses in New Jersey, where they are raising two teenagers. O’Brien would have been the second Ruth Ann Schwarz had her husband not adopted her father’s name at their wedding uniting all of them under one name. His nom de plume is Frederic D. Schwarz. Being mirror opposites, Fred and Ruth pride themselves on being tolerant of the opposition.