Dr Conor O'Brien
Associate Professor in the Early Medieval History of the British Isles and North Atlantic World
The Queen's College
I did my undergraduate degree in History and English at Cork in Ireland (where I was born and raised), before coming to Oxford for graduate work. I completed my doctorate on the image of the Jewish temple in the writings of the Anglo-Saxon monk Bede; the subsequent book from this work won the 2017 Best Book Prize from the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists. After Oxford, I held research fellowships at Churchill College, Cambridge, and the Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Durham, as well as teaching positions at Sheffield and King’s College London. I returned to Oxford to take up my current post in 2020.
Research Interests
I am primarily a historian of ideas and beliefs, interested in how ‘religion’ (a controversial term for the Middle Ages) helps us understand early medieval history and how the early Middle Ages help us understand the history of religion.
I have just completed my second monograph, The Rise of Christian Kingship in the Early Medieval West (OUP). Taking a comparative approach that is sensitive to regional variation and the interconnected nature of the post-imperial Latin West, the book traces the slow, complex, and only ever partial way in which the concept of "Christian kingship" arose in the Latin West over the five centuries up to 840. It is the major output of a wider project that explored the possibility of a religion/secular distinction in the early Middle Ages, something about which I have published in Past & Present.
My exploration of the interweaving of politics and religion in the early Middle Ages has raised, for me at least, interesting questions about the possible relationship of this theme with environmental history. I hope to explore the early medieval "politics of nature" in the near future.
A separate strand in my research investigates issues of community and identity in the early medieval world, particularly the importance of the idea of the Church. Previously, my publications have focused on the interplay of religious and ethnic identities, but I am currently exploring the importance of group identity in the Insular Easter Controversy.
Since much of my teaching continues to focus on early medieval Britain and Ireland, I have begun to plan an introduction to the Insular world between the Romans and the vikings.
