Dr. Katarina O’Briain

Assistant Professor, English

Phone: (403) 531-9130
Email: Katarina.OBriain@stmu.ca
Office: A208

PhD English, Johns Hopkins University
MA English, Johns Hopkins University
BA English (Honours), University of Alberta

Specialization/research interests: Seventeenth and eighteenth-century literature and culture; georgic poetry; the rise of the novel; transatlantic literature.

I specialize in georgic (generally understood as the poetry of farm labor), craftsmanship, and political economy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I am also currently at work on a project investigating the crucial yet still overlooked role of georgic in early settler writing on the frontier of Western Canada. This project will involve extensive research at Calgary’s Glenbow Museum.

Alongside the literary survey, Renaissance, and eighteenth century, I would be delighted to teach courses in settler colonialism, feminist labor theory, and art and labor in the Enlightenment, depending on student interest. I’m thrilled to be joining St. Mary’s University and look forward to getting to know everyone in this wonderful community.

Fall 2017: English 200A, English 309
Fall 2018: English 200B, English 317

“Dryden’s Georgic Fictionality,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 30.3 (April 2018): 317–38.

“Frances Burney and the Art of Accident,” forthcoming in NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 28 pp. ms.

“Swift’s Georgics of the South Sea.” The Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Toronto (October 2017)

“What is the Craft in Statecraft?; or, The Problem of Value in Dryden’s The Medall.” Modern Language Association, Austin (January 2016)

“The Matter of Swift’s Poetry.” The American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Williamsburg (March 2014)

“Monarchical Aesthetics: The Form of the Sovereign in Alexander Pope’s Windsor Forest.” The Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Edmonton (October 2012)

“Specters of the Multitude: Hamlet’s Synecdochical Hermeneutics.” “Afterlives,” UCLA English Southland Graduate Conference, University of California, Los Angeles, (June 2010)

“Auteur Manqué: Figurative Violence and Poetic Force in the Vanity of Human Wishes.” Graduate Student English Symposium, The University of Alberta (April 2010)