Joanne Deirdre Morgan was born in 1959 in Ottawa, Canada. She grew up in a Canadian diplomatic family, living in Moscow, Brussels and Vienna, before moving to Canberra, Australia in 1975. She finished a honors degree in political science and philosophy at the Australian National University in 1982. She was actively involved in the Women's Liberation Movement during the early 1980s and was employed as a child support worker in a women's refuge. After becoming an Australian citizen, she joined the public service and worked as a policy officer for the Federal and State governments. In 1996 she returned to university studies, completing a Social Work degree in 1999. She won a Commonwealth scholarship to undertake PhD studies in sociology at the University of Sydney. The title of her completed thesis is "Social Change and the Charismatic 'Author-Leader': A Case Study of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique" (2002).
Jo's interest in the widespread social problems generated by pedophilia was sparked by background research for her article "US Hate Crime Legislation: A Legal Model to Avoid in Australia", published in the Journal of Sociology in 2002 (abstract). She initially read Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita intending to include it as a literary case study of pedophilia within her PhD thesis. Instead she became side-tracked by the author's insistence that he had planted a 'riddle' within Lolita. Solving Nabokov's Lolita Riddle is Jo's first book.
Jo is also a member of the small acoustic folk group, Joyshell. You can hear a few demo songs from Joyshell's recent CD at www.joyshell.com
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