FACULTY


David O'Brien
Associate Professor
Art History

obrien1@illinois.edu | CV

Teaching areas:

18th- and 19th-century European art

Research areas:

French art of the nineteenth century, Contemporary art

Degrees:

B.A. Harvard University, M.A. University of Michigan, Ph.D. University of Michigan

David O'Brien (Associate Professor, A.B., Harvard University, M.A. and Ph.D., University of Michigan) specializes in European art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is the author of After the Revolution: Antoine-Jean Gros, Painting, and Propaganda under Napoleon (Penn State University Press, 2006; French translation published by Editions Gallimard, 2006), and his articles have appeared in Burlington Magazine, French Historical Studies, French History, and other journals and exhibition catalogs. Professor O'Brien has a secondary interest in contemporary art. With David Prochaska he has published Beyond East and West: Seven Transnational Artists (University of Washington Press, 2004). He is co-editor, with Vernon Burton, of Remembering Brown at Fifty: The University of Illinois Commemorates Brown v Board of Education (fUniversity of Illinois Press, 2009), which includes works and essays by artists, writers, scholars and activists about the landmark Supreme Court decision.

Selected Work

  • After the Revolution: Antoine-Jean Gros, Painting, and Propaganda under Napoleon, (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2006)

  • Antoine-Jean Gros, peintre de Napoléon, (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2006). [French translation of above.]

  • With David Prochaska, Beyond East and West: Seven Transnational Artists, exh. cat. (Champaign: Krannert Art Museum and University of Washington Press, 2004)

  • With Vernon Burton, Remembering Brown at Fifty: The University of Illinois Commemorates Brown v. Board of Education (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009)

Professor O'Brien offers survey courses focusing on the major movements of nineteenth-century European art as well as specialized courses dealing with orientalism, exoticism, primitivism, and questions of method.