Karen Elisabeth O'Brien FRSA is a British academic administrator and scholar of English literature, specialising in the Enlightenment and eighteenth-century literature.^[2] Since 2022, she has been Vice-Chancellor and Warden of Durham University^[3] (the first woman to hold the office), having previously been Professor of English Literature and Head of the Humanities Division, University of Oxford, and a Fellow of University College, Oxford.^[4][5]

Prior to her time at Oxford, she was a pro-vice-chancellor at the University of Birmingham^[2] and then Vice-Principal for Education at King's College London.^[3][4] O'Brien's scholarly work focuses on the British, American and French Enlightenments, and on British literature more generally between 1660 and 1820.^[6] She was awarded her doctoral degree (DPhil) by St Cross College, Oxford in 1986 for a thesis on English,^[7] after having completed her undergraduate studies at University College.^[8] She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and an Honorary Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge.^[9]

• O'Brien, Karen (1997). Narratives of enlightenment: cosmopolitan history from Voltaire to Gibbon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521465335.
• O'Brien, Karen (2009). Women and Enlightenment in eighteenth-century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521773492.
• Garside, Peter; O'Brien, Karen, eds. (2015). English and British fiction: 1750-1820. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199574803.
• O'Brien, Karen; Young, Brian, eds. (2018). The Cambridge companion to Edward Gibbon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1107035119.