
Dr. Katarina O’Briain
Assistant Professor, English
Phone: (403) 254-3720
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.
Originally from Edmonton, I completed my BA at the University of Alberta and my PhD in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins University. My work considers the relationship between poetry, labor, and political economy in seventeenth and eighteenth-century literature and culture. An abiding concern of this research is the relationship between ethics, politics, and literary form, which also informs much of my teaching. Encouraging students to develop arguments and to consider different or surprising ways of thinking is one of my favorite things about teaching in the humanities.
Publications
“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.
Conferences
“Georgic Ethics, Georgic Action.” Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Quebec City (October 2019)
“Phillis Wheatley and the Limits of Craft Labor.” American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Denver (March 2019)
“Phillis Wheatley and the Limits of Georgic.” American Comparative Literature Association, Washington DC (March 2019)
“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)