Patricia O'Brien

Associate Professor Patricia O’Brien is faculty in the Asian Studies Program at Georgetown University, teaching on Pacific pasts, presents and futures. She is also an Honorary Associate Professor in the Department of Pacific Affairs at Australian National University, Canberra, where she was an Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the School of History from 2014 to 2019.

From 2001 to 2013 she was the resident Australian and Pacific historian at Georgetown University. She was the J. D. Stout Fellow in New Zealand Studies at Victoria University Wellington in 2012 and the Jay I. Kislak Fellow in American Studies at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, Washington DC in 2011. In 2020, she returned to Georgetown's Asian Studies Program and Department of History where she teaches on the Pacific and Australia.

She is the author of Tautai: Sāmoa, World History and the Life and Ta’isi O. F. Nelson (2017), The Pacific Muse: Exotic Femininity and the Colonial Pacific (2006) and is co-editor with Joy Damousi of League of Nations: Histories, Legacies and Impact (2018). She has also written numerous other Pacific-focused cultural histories. She is currently working on a co-edited book on Samoa's 2021 Constitutional Crisis with Tamasailau Suaalii Sauni from the University of Auckland. Her other latest work features a biography of Australia's first Hollywood star, Errol Flynn, forthcoming in 2026.

Since 2021 she has written over 70 articles on a range of contemporary and historical Australian, New Zealand, Pacific, US and French issues for numerous bureaus of The Conversation and she is an Oceania blogger for the leading foreign policy publication, The Diplomat. O'Brien is also a regular media expert and podcast interview subject. Her publications, op. eds, and media appearances are linked below.