The Faculty
Professor Michael O'Brien
Professor of American Intellectual History
Cambridge CB5 8BL
Biography:
Michael O’Brien was an undergraduate and research student at Trinity Hall, 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 and a Member of the American Antiquarian Society.
Subject groups/Research projects
Departments and Institutes
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, the epistemology of American science in the late nineteenth century, African-American thought in the 1960s, and (inexplicably) American foreign policy in Nasser's Egypt.
Teaching
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”.
Key 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 Legaré (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 a Nominated Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History]
- Henry Adams and the Southern Question (2005) [Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2006]
- Placing the South (2007)
- Mrs. Adams in Winter: A Journey in the Last Days of Napoleon (2010) [Nominated Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography and Autobiography]
- Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860: An Abridgment of Conjectures of Order (2010)