Karen O'Brien

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]

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]

• 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.

• Vice-Chancellors and Wardens of Durham University