Skip to main content
University of Virginia

John O'Brien

Professor

Primary menu
  • HOME
  • Publications
  • Digital Projects
  • Biography
  • Courses
  1. Home
  • OBrienSPECIALTIES

    18th C British, Digital Humanities, Early American, Restoration

    My written work has focused on the relationship between literary and other social forms in the long eighteenth century in Britain. In my book Harlequin Britain, I explore the relationship between pantomime...

    Read More

Publications

Dark Matter: The Place of Poetry in Eighteenth-Century Newspapers (in progress)

  • Busy Bodies: The Plots of Susanna Centlivre
  • Harlequin Britain: Eighteenth-Century British Pantomime and the Cultural Location of Entertainment(s)
  • Union Jack: Amnesia and the Law in Daniel Defoe's Colonel Jack
  • Grub Street: The Literary and the Literatory in Eighteenth-Century Britain
  • The Character of Credit: Daniel Defoe's Lady Credit
  • Police, Insurance, Smollett
  • Serial Form and the Insurantial Imaginary
  • Infamous Harlequin Mimicry:Apprentices and the Mass Audience
  • Why Was Harlequin’s Face Black?
  • The South Sea Bubble as Turning Point
  • Response:Defoe and Joyce, panel on "Defoe and the Revised Version of the Rise of the Novel
  • Susanna Centlivre and the Reception of the Popular
More

Featured Project

  • Notes on the State of Virginia

    A digital variorum edition of Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. Newly transcribed and annotated, edited with Brad Pasanek and Virginia Anne Kinniburgh, in cooperation with U.V.A...

    Read More Notes on the State of Virginia
More

Contact me


jobrien@virginia.edu

Office: 230 Bryan Hall

Office Hours: Tuesdays 12-2; Wednesdays 11-12, and by appointment
 

 

 

Powered byOpenScholar®Admin Login
Copyright ©2026 By the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia