Mary Harris O’Reilly was a PhD candidate in Modern German History at the University of Michigan, studying with Professors Geoff Eley, Kathleen Canning, and Scott Spector. She was completing her dissertation, Fashioning the Modern German Woman: Female Journalists and Discourses of the Self in Interwar Germany.
Mary received an A.B. degree in Political Science from Bryn Mawr College and an M.A. in European Studies from the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies.
Before moving to Ann Arbor, Michigan to begin her graduate studies, she worked for twelve years in Washington, D.C. for several Members of Congress and non-profit policy organizations.
Mary lived in Berlin, Germany, for two years as a Fulbright Scholar and as a fellow in the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin.
Mary died of ovarian cancer in 2009.