Karen O'Brien

Karen Elisabeth O'Brien is a British academic administrator and scholar of English literature, specialising in the Enlightenment and eighteenth-century literature.^[1] Since 2016, she has been Professor of English Literature and Head of the Humanities Division, University of Oxford, and a Fellow of University College, Oxford.^[2][3]

In May 2021, it was announced that she has been appointed Vice-Chancellor and Warden of Durham University: she will take up office on 4 January 2022 and will be the first woman to head the university.^[4][5] Prior to her time at Oxford, she was a pro-vice-chancellor at the University of Birmingham^[1] and then Vice-Principal for Education at King's College London.^[4][2] O'Brien's work focuses on the British, American and French Enlightenments, and on British literature more generally between 1660 and 1820.^[6]

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.

References[]