John O'Brien

My written work has focused on the relationship between literary and other social forms in the long eighteenth century in Britain. In my book Harlequin Britain, I explore the relationship between pantomime entertainments--the most popular form of theatrical performance in the period--and the public sphere. My current work focuses on the relationship between literature and economics in Britain and American in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in particular on the emergence of the corporation as an economic and imagined entity, and the ramifications of that in genres like insurance and money. I teach classes in eighteenth-century drama and the novel, as well as courses in the transatlantic eighteenth century and the literature of the seventeen-nineties.