Katarina O’Briain specializes in the literature and culture of the global eighteenth century. She is at work on a book manuscript, tentatively titled Georgic Dispossessions: Poetry Across the Long Eighteenth Century. This project traces the ways in which georgic poetry has been used to justify ongoing histories of settler colonialism and racial capitalism; it also tells an alternate history of the mode by engaging the work of Black, Indigenous, and anticolonial writers of the period who refuse to define land as capital. A second research project — on the transpacific eighteenth century, with a particular focus on Tagalog poetry and the Manila–Acapulco Galleon Trade — is in the earliest stages of planning.

Before joining York University, Katarina O’Briain taught courses in literary history, Black Atlantic literature, and research methodologies at St. Mary’s University, Calgary, where she received a Teaching Excellence Award in 2021. Her classes often encourage the development of slow, close readings of texts to offer new perspectives on old works of literature and to think carefully about how some of the most urgent social questions of the eighteenth century live on in our present moment.

Current Courses

Katarina O’Briain specializes in the literature and culture of the global eighteenth century. She is at work on a book manuscript, tentatively titled Georgic Dispossessions: Poetry Across the Long Eighteenth Century. This project traces the ways in which georgic poetry has been used to justify ongoing histories of settler colonialism and racial capitalism; it also tells an alternate history of the mode by engaging the work of Black, Indigenous, and anticolonial writers of the period who refuse to define land as capital. A second research project — on the transpacific eighteenth century, with a particular focus on Tagalog poetry and the Manila–Acapulco Galleon Trade — is in the earliest stages of planning.

Before joining York University, Katarina O’Briain taught courses in literary history, Black Atlantic literature, and research methodologies at St. Mary’s University, Calgary, where she received a Teaching Excellence Award in 2021. Her classes often encourage the development of slow, close readings of texts to offer new perspectives on old works of literature and to think carefully about how some of the most urgent social questions of the eighteenth century live on in our present moment.

Degrees

Current Courses