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Patricia O'Brien
Dean, College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences;
Professor of History
Ph.D., Columbia University, 1973
(951) 827-2762
pat.obrien@ucr.edu |
- Fields of interest: Modern France; social and cultural
history of nineteenth-century France; modern Europe.
Pat O'Brien was trained as a French
historian at Columbia University where she received her Ph.D.
In college, she was well prepared as a history major at Regis
College in Weston, Massachusetts. Her first teaching position
was at Yale University from 1971 to 1974. Before joining the
UC Riverside History Department in 1999, O'Brien was professor
of history at the University of California, Irvine, where she
served as chair of the department and as Associate Vice Chancellor
and Acting Vice Chancellor for Research. From 1994 to 1999,
O'Brien directed the University of California Humanities Research
Institute, a multi-campus research unit serving the nine campuses
of the UC system.
O'Brien is a specialist in modern
French history and in nineteenth- and twentieth-century social
and cultural history. Her book on the French prison system,
The Promise of Punishment: Prisons in Nineteenth-Century
France (Princeton, 1982), was translated into French as
Correction ou châtiment (Paris, Presses universitaires
de France, 1988). With co-authors Mark Kishlkansky and Patrick
Geary, O'Brien has published Civilization
in the West (New York: Addison, Wesley, Longman: 1998),
now in its third edition, and Societies and Cultures in
World History ([co-authors, Kishlkansky, Geary, and R.B.
Wong] New York, Harper Collins, 1994). Her recent articles include
"Comparative Dimensions of Prison Reform in France and Other
European Countries in the Nineteenth Century," in Norbert Finzsch
and Robert Jutte, eds., The Prerogative of Confinement:
Social, Cultural, Political, and Administrative Aspects of the
History of Hospitals and Carceral and Penal Institutions in
Western Europe and North America, 1500-1900 (Cambridge
University Press, 1996); "The Modern Prison on the Continent,
1865-1965," in Norval Morris and David Rothman, eds., The Oxford
History of the Prison (New York, Oxford University Press, 1995);
and "Michel Foucault's History of Culture," in Lynn Hunt, ed.,
The New Cultural History (Berkeley, 1988 [Portuguese
edition, Martins Fontes, Sao Paulo, 1992; Japanese edition,
Tokyo, 1993]).
Pat O'Brien has held fellowships
from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National
Humanities Center, and has twice held the post of directeur
d'études at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales
in Paris, France. She is currently writing "The Political Culture
of the French State in the Nineteenth Century."
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