Historian to Lecture on 'Adams Family and Classical Tradition'

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Michael O'Brien, the 2014 Donovan Lecturer

Michael O’Brien, professor of American intellectual history at Cambridge University, will be the 2014 Donovan Lecturer in the department of history. He will give a lecture titled “The Adams Family and the Classical Tradition” at 5 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 19, in Giffels Auditorium of Old Main.

O’Brien, a fellow of Jesus College, is the author or editor of 11 books. Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life in the American South, 1810-1860, (University of North Carolina Press, 2004), his two-volume landmark study, won the Bancroft Prize in American History in 2005 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Mrs. Adams in Winter: A Journey in the Last Days of Napoleon, an account of Louisa Catherine Adams’ journey from Moscow to Paris in 1815, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2011. She was the wife of John Quincy Adams. His edited volume, The Letters of C. Vann Woodward (Yale University Press), appeared last fall. He is currently completing a history of intellectual life in America to be published with Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux.

A Fellow of the British Academy, O’Brien has taught at many institutions in the U.S. and in Britain. He taught history at the University of Arkansas from 1980-87, and was the Shriver Professor of History at Miami University of Ohio from 1987-2002.

He has taught full-time at Cambridge University for more than a decade. He was educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge and Vanderbilt University, before returning to Cambridge where he received the doctoral degree in 1976.