Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe


Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe is an American medievalist specializing in [Old English literature|English literature|Old English]. Her work focuses on orality and literacy, manuscript cultures, and questions of embodiment and agency in Old English and Anglo-Latin literature. She is Professor Emerita of English at UC Berkeley.

Career

O'Brien O'Keeffe received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1975. In that year, she joined the Department of English at Texas A&M University.
In 1990, O'Brien O'Keeffe's book Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse appeared from Cambridge University Press, introducing the idea of "transitional literacy" to debates about the orality of Old English poetry. In 1992, she joined the faculty at the University of Notre Dame. She edited and co-edited numerous volumes on the editing of Old English, early English culture, Anglo-Latin learning, and related subjects. In 2008, she became the Clyde and Evelyn Slusser Professor of English at UC Berkeley. Her book Stealing Obedience: Narratives of Agency and Identity in Later Anglo-Saxon England appeared from University of Toronto Press in 2012.
O'Brien O'Keeffe became a Guggenheim Fellow in 1997, became a fellow of the Medieval Academy of America in 2015, and held the Eastman Professorship at Oxford University from 2017-2018.

Selected publications

Books

Stealing Obedience: Narratives of Agency and Identity in Later Anglo-Saxon England Electronic Textual Editing Latin Learning and English Lore Unlocking the Wordhord: Anglo-Saxon Studies in Memory of Edward B. Irving, Jr. New Approaches to Editing Old English Verse The Book and the Body Reading Old English Texts Old English Shorter Poems Cultural Artifacts and the Production of Meaning: The Page, the Image, and the Body
  • ''Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse''

Chapters

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