Karen O'Brien

Karen O'Brien FRSA
25th Vice-Chancellor and Warden of Durham University
Incumbent
Assumed office January 2022
Preceded by	Stuart Corbridge
Personal details
Alma mater	University College, Oxford St Cross College, Oxford

Karen Elisabeth O'Brien FRSA is a British academic administrator and scholar of English literature, specialising in the Enlightenment and eighteenth-century literature. Since 2022, she has been Vice-Chancellor and Warden of Durham University (the first woman to hold the office), having previously been Professor of English Literature and Head of the Humanities Division, University of Oxford, and a Fellow of University College, Oxford.

Prior to her time at Oxford, she was a pro-vice-chancellor at the University of Birmingham and then Vice-Principal for Education at King's College London. O'Brien's scholarly work focuses on the British, American and French Enlightenments, and on British literature more generally between 1660 and 1820. She was awarded her doctoral degree (DPhil) by St Cross College, Oxford in 1986 for a thesis on English, after having completed her undergraduate studies at University College. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and an Honorary Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge.

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.