MEREDITH W. MICHAELS Research Associate E-mail: mmichael@smith.edu Curriculum Vitae TEACHING AND RESEARCH INTERESTS Meredith Michaels teaches and writes about the ethics and epistemology of reproduction. She is particularly interested in the ways that social expectations regarding women's status as mothers shape what count as biological and cultural facts. Though her focus has been on Twentieth ( and now Twenty First) Century contestations over women's reproductive agency, she is also interested in their historical roots in the "Scientific Revolution" of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries. Her most recent scholarly book, which she wrote with Lynn M. Morgan, Professor of Anthropology at Mount Holyoke College, is Fetal Positions/Feminist Practices (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). Her ongoing commitment to the revitalization of undergraduate philosophy has generated the fifth edition of Twenty Questions: An Introduction to Philosophy (with Lee Bowie and Robert Solomon, Wadsworth, 2003). A new book The Mommy Myth:The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Undermines Women, with Susan J. Douglas (Free Press 2004) is about the representation of motherhood in the media since the 1970s. A precursor to the book can be found in Ms. Magazine Jan/Feb 2000 under the title "Mommy Wars" which is a comparison of media representations of celebrity and welfare mothers. She is currently at work on an exploration of the recent "explosion" of high-order multiple births (septuplets, octuplets) in relation to the moral/political status of fetuses. At Smith, she has taught courses on reproductive ethics, feminist theory and feminist interpretations of Descartes.