Clare O’Connor is a scholar of communication systems, religion, and politics. She studies the historical development of U.S. political dreamscapes with a focus on myth, collective desire, and cultural relations of power.

She is working on two books. The first, Sublime Repression: Reverence for Nature in American Racism, explores the visual economy of racialist myths of a return to nature.

The second, Battle in the Clouds: The Angel in Popular Culture, analyzes the political implications of our common longing for wholeness. Building on her doctoral research, she shows how ubiquitous expressions of this longing—for the reconciliation of one’s being and doing, and its corollary of reconciled human and natural history—are important sites of political contestation.

O’Connor’s work has appeared in Communication, Culture & Critique, International Journal of Communication, Theory in Action, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Briarpatch Magazine, and various movement-based publications.

Her editorial contributions include the special issue “Unsettled Debts: 1968 and the Problem Historical Memory,” (2022) for the International Journal of Communication, and Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late-Capitalist Struggle  (2016, AK Press), with Kelly Fritsch and AK Thompson. She served on the Editorial Committee of Upping the Anti: A Journal of Theory and Action from 2007 to 2013. 

She holds a PhD from the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California, where she currently works as an adjunct lecturer. Her research has been supported through grants from the Annenberg Foundation, USC Graduate School, and Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.