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Dr Karen O'Brien

BA (Hons) (UNSW) MA (UNSW) PhD (UWS) Grad. Cert. H. Ed. (UNSW)

Karen joined the Koori Centre in 2009 and teaches a range of courses. She has several broad areas of interest; these include Indigenous Studies, colonising and decolonising histories and early modern micro-histories, popular mentalities and researching communities from manuscripts and primary sources in British history. Her teaching interests are extensive and include Indigenous Studies, colonizing and decolonizing histories, modern European history and Australian and Irish history. Her interests include spoken crime, manuscript studies, mentalities and oral culture of the early modern period, especially social, economic and gender contexts, examining criminal complaints and finding out how gendered ideas about female verbal crime were disseminated. Current research involves the study and reconstitution of communities from legal manuscripts, diaries, letters and notebooks of women in seventeenth century Britain. The documents are rich in personal narrative and are fascinating sources of life stories which students find interesting. She is also interested in the development of early modern popular medicine

Karen’s work involves the resurrection of the biographies of hundreds of people from a town in seventeenth-century England. Her research examines legal records from the manorial courts, church courts, and quarter sessions and assizes in England and Wales and researching original manuscripts in Old English, Middle English and Latin Bastardi. Her previous academic interests involve palaeography and the reconstitution of primary source materials and study of diaries, casebooks and papers of those involved in spoken crimes such as cursing, scolding, defamation and cunning.

She has been involved in Indigenous studies for 16 years and has multi disciplinary interests and is published in Indigenous studies, literature and socio-legal history.

Research Areas

  • Micro-histories, mentalities and the micro-politics of everyday life
    Indigenous studies
  • Language and power constructs and cultural dissemination and transmission processes in history
  • Histories of colonisation and decolonisation
  • Early modern and modern British and European social, economic and gender history
  • Indigenous Studies

Current Projects

  • Gossip, slander and verbal violence in early modern British communities
  • Researching micro-histories, popular mentalities and communities
  • Popular medicine in early modern England

Selected Publications

Books:

  • A Midwife’s Curse: the Dynamics of Ill-will in Small Town Life, Palgrave-Macmillan, (forthcoming)
  • White Magic and the Cunning Folk: Charms and Blessings in Northwest England, the Bluecoat Press, 2001

Articles and Book Chapters:

Areas of Teaching and Research Supervision

Teaching:

  • KOCR 2600 Introduction to Indigenous Australia
  • KOCR 2604 Colours of Identity: Indigenous Bodies
  • KCSE 4203 Colonising and Decolonising the Pacific
  • KCSE 4103 Twentieth Century Europe: Age of Catastrophe?
  • KCSE 3104 From World War One to Whitlam

Supervision:

  • Indigenous history, Indigenous studies, Indigenous Higher Education
  • Early modern British social, economic and gender history
  • History of popular medicine
  • Micro-histories, mentalities and micro-politics
  • Crime and the courts in early modern Britain

Conference Activity

  • Regulating Women: the Mass Media of the Early Modern World, Reporting Futures, 2007 Annual Public Right to Know conference, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia, 2007
    Australia and New Zealand Legal History Society Conference,
  • ‘Fencepost in Legal History’, Violent Crime and Law and Order in Early Modern England, University of New England, New England, Australia, 2007
  • Macer’s Herbal and Popular Medicine in Late Medieval England, Network of Early European Research Forum, University of Melbourne, 2007
  • Academic Language, Power and Indigenous Education, Indigenous Studies and Indigenous Knowledge 2007 Conference, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, Australia, 2007
  • Universities and the New Research Environment, FEU Conference Centre, NTEU, Melbourne, 2006
  • Female Verbal Crime in Early Modern England, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK, 2004
  • Warawara Indigenous Centre, Macquarie University, Research Paper: ‘Language, Power and Social Justice: Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in Higher Education’, Sydney, Australia, July 2004
  • Female Verbal Crime in Early Modern England, School of History, University of NSW Research Seminar Programme, Sydney, Australia, May 2004
  • Female Verbal Crime in Seventeenth-Century Cheshire, Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, Liverpool Central Libraries, Liverpool, UK, March, 2004

Invited Lecturer:

  • Australasian College of Natural Therapies, Sydney, Australia, 2001
    Lecture: Healing Traditions of North-Western Europe: A Galenic Hegemony?
  • The Early Development of Herbal Medicine: An Overview
  • Traditional Knowledge: Healing in Northwest England c. 1700
  • The Apothecary Housewife
  • Common Herbs and Remedies of the Northwest, c. 1400 to 1800
  • Domestic Violence in Early Modern European History, lecture presented at School of Social Work, Gender-Related violence seminar, ANZAMEMS, the University of Sydney, July 2000
  • University of New South Wales, Australia
    Domestic Violence in Early Modern England, seminar presented to Staff and Postgraduates of the School of Social Work, University of New South Wales, Australia, October, 2000
  • Subversion and Scurrility: The politics of popular discourse in Europe from 1500 to the present. An interdisciplinary conference held at the University of Northumbria, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1996
  • Australia and New Zealand Medieval and Renaissance Society/Australian Historians of Medieval and Early Modern Europe (ANZMRS/AHMEME), University of Tasmania, The Consistory Court and the Case of Anne Knutsford, Midwife of Nantwich from 1662-1663, 1994

Awards

  • The Murray Macgregor Memorial Fellowship, St Deiniol's Library, Hawarden, North Wales

Other professional contributions

  • Review Editor, international refereed journal HERDSA Higher Education Research and Development Association of Australasia
  • Member, Board of Studies in Indigenous Studies

Contact Details:

Phone: (02) 9036 5199
Toll Free: 1800 622 742
Fax: (02) 9351 6924
Location: Room 214A Old Teachers College
Email: karen@koori.usyd.edu.au