Karen O'Brien
British academic administrator
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Karen Elisabeth O'Brien FRSA, is a British academic administrator and literary scholar, specialising in the Enlightenment and eighteenth-century European literature.[1] Since 2022, she has served as Vice-Chancellor and Warden of Durham University (being the first woman to hold this office).[2][3]
St Cross College, Oxford (DPhil)
Karen O'Brien | |
|---|---|
| 25th Vice Chancellor and Warden of Durham University | |
| Assumed office January 2022 | |
| Preceded by | Stuart Corbridge |
| Personal details | |
| Education | University College, Oxford (MA) St Cross College, Oxford (DPhil) |
Elected a Fellow of University College, Oxford in 2016,[4] O'Brien was Professor of English Literature and Head of the Humanities Division at the University of Oxford until 2021.[5]
Prior to her time at Oxford, O'Brien served as a Pro-Vice-Chancellor at the University of Birmingham[1] and then Vice-Principal for Education at King's College London.[2][5] O'Brien's scholarly work focuses on the British, American and French Enlightenments, and on British literature more generally between 1660 and 1820.[6] She took her doctoral degree (DPhil) at St Cross College in 1986 with a thesis on English literature,[7] after having completed her undergraduate studies at University College, Oxford, graduating MA.[8] She has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and an Honorary Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge.[9]
Selected works
- O'Brien, Karen (1997). Narratives of Enlightenment: cosmopolitan history from Voltaire to Gibbon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521465335.
- O'Brien, Karen (2009). Women and Enlightenment in eighteenth-century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521773492.
- Garside, Peter; O'Brien, Karen, eds. (2015). English and British fiction: 1750-1820. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199574803.
- O'Brien, Karen; Young, Brian, eds. (2018). The Cambridge Companion to Edward Gibbon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1107035119.