Patricia O’Brien

Patricia O’Brien is a wide-ranging historian and analyst of Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands. She is the author of Tautai: Sāmoa, World History and the Life of Ta’isi O. F. Nelson (University of Hawaii Press, 2017) and The Pacific Muse: Exotic Femininity and the Colonial Pacific (University of Washington Press, 2006) and is coeditor of League of Nations: Histories, Legacies and Impact (MUP Academic, 2018) and numerous other works. She was the resident Australian and Pacific historian at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., from 2000 to 2013, the Jay I. Kislak fellow in American studies at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress in 2011 and the J. D. Stout fellow in New Zealand studies at Victoria University of Wellington in 2012. From 2014 to 2019 she was an Australian Research Council future fellow in the School of History at Australian National University in Canberra. In 2020, she returned to Georgetown University to teach on Pacific pasts and presents in the Asian Studies Program. In addition to her ongoing historical writing and research, she is a widely published analyst and media commentator on Pacific-related topics, including Samoa’s constitutional crisis (and is also coediting a book on this complex topic), regional relations with Papua New Guinea, U.S. atomic testing in the Marshall Islands and its current implications, the Australia-UK-U.S. (AUKUS) agreement, and Covid-19 in the Pacific region and U.S.-based Pasifika communities. In 2021, she also joined the Australian National University’s Department of Pacific Affairs as a visiting fellow.