M. R. O'CONNOR

And who was I?

A reporter.

Why was I traveling?

To look, to walk around, to ask, to listen, to sniff, to think, to write.

–The Soccer War

A reporter with motley interests ranging from foreign policy, international development, science and ethics to criminal justice, M.R. O'Connor has made big ideas and counterintuitive questions the heart of her stories. Does foreign aid perpetuate poverty? Did feminism give birth to Girls Gone Wild? Is species extinction ever a good thing? Did human rights activists perpetuate the conflict in Darfur? 

A graduate of Columbia's Journalism School, she has reported from Africa, Afghanistan and Haiti, and her work has appeared in a variety of mainstream publications which can be viewed here.  In 2008/2009, she was a reporter for The Sunday Times, an English-language newspaper in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

O'Connor's investigative reporting on topics such as disappearances in Sri Lanka’s civil war, global agriculture trade, and American development enterprises in Afghanistan have been funded by institutions like the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, The Phillips Foundation, and The Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund.

For a long time she made her bread and butter as a stringer covering crime, courts and breaking news in New York City for publications such as The Wall Street Journal and New York Post, and covered criminal justice stories for the online investigative site The New York World. 

Her first book will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2015.