Deirdre English is the former Editor-in-Chief of Mother Jones magazine where she worked for eight years, ending in 1986. She has written and edited work on a wide array of subjects related to investigative reporting, cultural politics, gender studies, and public policy.
English was a co-founder of one of the first women’s studies programs in the US, and also taught American Studies and magazine feature writing, at the College of Old Westbury at the State University of New York. She has taught at City College of New York and the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her work includes For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts’s Advice to Women, co-authored with Barbara Ehrenreich and published with a new Afterword in 2004 (Anchor/Doubleday) Her work also includes Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers, and Complaints and Disorders: the Sexual Politics of Sickness.
She has contributed articles, commentaries and reviews to Mother Jones magazine, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, and Signs: A Feminist Journal, among other publications.Her essay on the work of photographer Susan Meiselas was published in Carnival Strippers,Whitney Museum of American Art, 2003. Her essay “The Fear that Feminism will Free Men First” has been anthologized in numerous collections, most recently in Women’s Liberation! Feminist Writings that Inspired a Revolution & Still Can, edited by Honor Moore and Alix Kates Shulman, Library of America, 2021.
English has taught at the J-school since 2000, and directed the Felker Magazine course for six years, during which time Brink Magazine, which she edited and produced with her students, won many awards and was twice named Best Student Magazine in the nation in the Mark of Excellence competition judged by the Society of Professional Journalists.
She has taught seminars on narrative writing, on “Gender and Journalism” and “Intersectional Identities.” She also taught a large lecture course on “Big Issues in Journalism” in Fall, 2021.