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Education

2011 Providence College, B.A.
2012 McGill University, M.A.
2019 University of South Carolina, Ph.D

View CV

Courses Taught

US to 1877
US since 1877
The Civil War
Revolutionary America
Cities and Global Connections

Career Specialties

G. Patrick O'Brien is a historian of revolutionary America, who specializes in loyalist women and families, the experience of exile in Nova Scotia and loyalist slavery.

Professional and Community Activities

O'Brien's research focuses on revolutionary-era women and the experience of loyalist exile in Nova Scotia. His current book project, titled Unknown and Unlamented: The Exile and Repatriation of a Loyalist Family in the Era of the American Revolution, is a microhistory that explores the unique experiences of seven members across three generations of one loyalist family to capture the variety and complexities of loyalism and the tumult wrought by the Revolution on eighteenth-century people.

Dedicated to reaching a broad audience, O'Brien has worked closely with scholars in the United States and Canada.

In June 2023, The New England Quarterly published his article, “Duty and Love: Flora Lee’s Resistance to Slavery in Revolutionary Marblehead,” which employs a biographical lens to investigate the everyday resistance of enslaved New Englanders during the Revolution. He also published, “Those Who Did Not Extend Their Connections Were the Happiest”: Loyalist Women, Exile and Marriage in the Post-Revolutionary World," in Selected Papers of the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era, 1750-1850 (2021-2) and “‘Gilded Misery’: The Robie Women in Loyalist Exile and Repatriation, 1775-1790," in the Spring 2020 issue of Acadiensis: Journal of the History of the Atlantic Region.

O'Brien has presented his research at regional, national and international conferences, including at the Massachusetts Historical Society’s 2022 Conrad E. Wright Research Conference, the 2022 Atlantic Canada Studies Conference, the 2021 Consortium of the Revolutionary Era, the 2019 meeting of the American Historical Association and the 2019 meeting of L’Association Française d’Études Canadiennes, among others. As a former high school educator, O'Brien has a passion for working with K-12 educators, and in September 2023, the Massachusetts Historical Society published “Massachusetts Loyalists: Revolution and Exile” as a part of their “History Source” initiative. He has also worked with secondary school teachers at the Massachusetts Historical Society’s 2021 and 2018 Teachers’ Workshop, at the Coastal Heritage Society of Savannah’s Revolutionary Perspectives Series in September 2018 and by sharing lesson plans with the Canadian Historical Association’s “Teaching and Learning Blog.”

Honors and Awards

Keith Armistead Carr Fellowship, The Society of the Cincinnati
W.B.H. Dowse Research Fellowship, Massachusetts Historical Society
Buchanan-Burnham Fellowship, Newport Historical Society
Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Dissertation Completion Fellowship, University of South Carolina College of Arts and Sciences
University of South Carolina History Department Award for Excellence in Teaching Assistantship