FHIS department profile introduction:
Dr O’Brien is a lecturer of French at UBC Vancouver.
She is of mixed origin and grew up in Belgium, bilingual (trilingual when very small). Her background has shaped a broader concern with hybridity, migrancy, cosmopolitanism, and tolerance. She has been at UBC since 2009. Before then, she taught at Princeton University, Trinity College Dublin (Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies), and University College Dublin. She has also worked in bookselling, freelance web-design, and translation.
She teaches French language, literature, and culture. Her research is on Medieval literature and culture (mainly Old French and Occitan poetry), connections between medieval and post-medieval textuality and hypertextuality, the purpose of reading and its practice in interactive communities, and the integration of teaching and research in/as learning. Her other interests—some of which conjoin her teaching and research—include speculative fictions of many forms and from many times (Medieval marginalia and romance, bande dessinée and graphic novels, SF, cinema), and food.
Her main blog is Meta-meta-medieval.
This present site is a teaching portfolio.
