Laura M. O'Brien

Schedule an Appointment with Laura

Laura oversees a team of Research and Instruction Librarians who provide research and instruction support to faculty and students in their use of library materials and sources found elsewhere for papers, projects, and personal reasons. This can include helping students refine their research skills and locate new sources in one-on-one consults or group classes, or consulting with faculty as they develop research assignments.

Laura serves as the research and instruction librarian for French, Theatre, Classics, and the Writing Program. 

Laura became a part of Wellesley's Research and Instruction Support team in 2010. 

Current interests and activities

I co-teach with Hélène Bilis the upper-level French course "Six Degrees of Marie Antoinette: Social Networks and the French Revolution." Other recent projects include the organization of a digital Transcribathon in collaboration with the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the collaborative support of network analysis of an early modern novel in Gephi. I enjoy exploring the use of technologies to bring new perspectives to literature and the humanities--from "distant reading" to engaging students as producers and reproducers of the texts they study through mashups, text encoding, or other techniques. I am interested in the pedagogy of digital humanities in a liberal arts context.