Faculty Associate
kobriain[at]yorku.ca
Assistant Professor
Department of English, York University
Research Keywords:
Global eighteenth century; transpacific studies; transoceanic studies; settler colonialism; poetry and poetics
Research Region(s):
Philippines
Research Diaspora(s):
Filipino Diaspora
Katarina O’Briain is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at York University where she specializes in the literature and culture of the global eighteenth century. Her current book project, "Georgic Dispossessions: Poetry Across the Long Eighteenth Century," traces the ways in which georgic poetry has been used to justify ongoing histories of settler colonialism and racial capitalism; it also tells an alternate history of the mode by engaging the work of Black, Indigenous and anticolonial writers of the period who refuse to define land as capital.
She has begun work on a second project, “Manila in the Transoceanic Archive: The Poetics of Colonial Occupation, 1762–64,” which studies the British siege and occupation of Manila at the end of the Seven Years’ War. Reading Tagalog poetry alongside a range of archival materials, this project considers the frictions, solidarities, and antagonisms of the British invasion; the project also situates established literary and colonial texts within a history of shifting forms of dispossession and a long and ongoing history of Philippine resistance. This project is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Recent work relating to both projects has been published in or is forthcoming from Eighteenth-Century Fiction, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and PMLA.