Faculty

Maura O'Connor                        
Associate Professor
Fields: modern Britain and the Empire,
modern Europe, comparative

Phone: 513 556-2198
Email: maura.oconnor@uc.edu           
Office: 335C McMicken

Professor O’Connor received her BA in European Studies from Mount Holyoke College and her doctorate in history from the University of California, Berkeley. She has taught at the University of Cincinnati since 1992. Her areas of research interest have been the comparative social and cultural history of nineteenth-century Europe, primarily Britain and the empire, with strong secondary interests that extend chronologically from the eighteenth to the twentieth century and geographically from France to Italy. Her current research project titled “Risking the World: The London Stock Exchange and the British Empire,” focuses on nineteenth-century international finance, the culture of risk capital, and the gendered politics of speculating and investing in the British Empire from the Napoleonic War to the South African War. 

Selected Courses:
History of the British Empire, 1763-1947 (graduate)
Comparative, Cross-National, Transnational Histories and Methodologies (graduate)
Cultures of Capitalism
Eighteenth Century Britain and the Empire
Nineteenth Century Britain and the Empire
Twentieth Century Europe

Selected Publications:
“Gambling, Speculating, and Risk Taking in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda in Nancy Henry and Cannon Schmidt, eds., Victorian Investments: New Perspectives on Finance and Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, Forthcoming).

Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective, contributor and co-editor with Deborah Cohen, (New York: Routledge, 2004).

“Civilizing Southern Italy: English and Italian Women and the Cultural Politics of European Nation Building,” in Special Issue of Women’s Writing, “La Bella Libertà: Women and the Flight to Italy,” guest editor, Barbara Caine (10, no. 2 November 2003), pp. 253-268.