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Professor Michael O'Brien
Professor of American Intellectual History
Michael O’Brien was an undergraduate and research
student at Cambridge in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but then spent
twenty-five years at various American universities (Michigan, Arkansas,
Miami of Ohio), before returning to Cambridge in 2002. He is a Fellow of
the British Academy.
Research Interests
Until recently, he has mainly written about the
intellectual culture of the American South, both in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries: its literature, political philosophy, historical
imagination, and sense of self, as it has been formed by local social
experience and interactions with other cultures. More recently, he has
written about the Adams family of Quincy, Massachusetts. His current
project is an edition of the selected letters of C. Vann Woodward
(1908-99), the American historian. More broadly, he has interests in the
aesthetics of historical literature, Romanticism, gender, and the
history of jazz.
Teaching Interests
He
lectures on American history between 1789 and 1865, but contributes to
other lecture series in Part I of the Historical Tripos on earlier and
later periods, when aspects of American intellectual life need
discussion. He has in recent years taught a Special Subject on the
“Adams Family and American Culture”.
Areas of Research Supervision
He has
supervised research students at universities in the United States and at
Cambridge on various aspects of American history since the late
eighteenth century: topics have included Southern intellectuals (Richard
Weaver, Thomas Cooper, Basil Manly, St George Tucker), the
constitutionality of the Second Amendment, Unionism in antebellum South
Carolina, Noah Webster and American concepts of language,
prisoner-of-war narratives after the Civil War, Southern concepts of
honor, German emigré intellectuals, George Santayana, Henry Adams,
freedmen's aid societies during Reconstruction, the pragmatism of
Clarence Irving Lewis, and (inexplicably) American foreign policy in
Nasser's Egypt.
Chief Publications
- The Idea Of The American South, 1920-41 (1979)
- ed. All Clever Men, Who Make Their Way: Critical Discourse In The Old
South (1982)
- A Character Of Hugh Legare (1985)
- ed. with David Moltke Hansen, Intellectual Life In Antebellum Charleston
(1986)
- Rethinking The South: Essays In Intellectual History (1988)
- ed., An Evening When Alone: Four Journals Of Single Women In The South,
1827-67 (1993)
- Conjectures Of Order: Intellectual Life and The American South, 1810-60,
2 vols (2004) [Winner of the Bancroft Prize, Columbia University; the Frank L.
and Harriet C. Owsley Award, Southern Historical Association; the Merle Curti
Award, Organization of American Historians; the C. Hugh Holman Award, Society
for the Study of Southern Literature; the American Studies Network Book Prize;
and one of two Nominated Finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in History]
- Henry Adams and the Southern Question (2005) [Choice
Outstanding Academic Title, 2007]
- Placing the South (2007)
- Mrs. Adams in Winter: A Journey in the Last Days of Napoleon (2010)
- Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860: An Abridgment of
Conjectures of Order (2010)
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