Juliet O'Brien

University of British Columbia, French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies, Faculty Member

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I teach French language, literature, and culture; and I write (and talk at academic conferences) about Medieval literature and culture (mainly in French and Occitan), connections between medieval and post-medieval textualities and hypertextuality, the purpose of reading and its practice in interactive communities, and the integration of teaching and research in---and as---learning.

My background has also shaped a broader concern with hybridity, migrancy, cosmopolitanism, and tolerance. My other interests--some of which conjoin my teaching and research--include speculative fictions of many forms and from many times (Medieval romance, bande dessinée and graphic novels, science fiction, cinema), and food.

Papers here link to posts on my blog, were written in that form, and are intended to be read as such. For copyleft reasons and in the interests of free public open access to knowledge---also free of meta-profiteering by others---they are not available here as downloadable PDFs. Please do not ask me to upload papers as PDFs here.

(BA Cambridge, BA Manchester, PhD Princeton; previously taught at Trinity College Dublin (Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies) and University College Dublin.)

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Papers by Juliet O'Brien

Open But Not Free : Invisible Labour in Open Scholarship

In recent years, the open scholarship movement has gained momentum by aiming to fundamentally tra... more In recent years, the open scholarship movement has gained momentum by aiming to fundamentally transform how knowledge is created and shared. Making open access, open data, and open education the default in higher education promises to remove barriers to learning and make knowledge as broadly accessible as possible. In practice, though, the rise of open scholarship has resulted in new challenges for practitioners and stakeholders working within a system in transition. To what extent do the adoption of open practices and policies in higher education currently rely on invisible labour? And what may be the impact on the sustainability of the movement? Who is able to participate? Who may be excluded? How can open practitioners and stakeholders work together to ensure that diversity, equity, and inclusion are prioritized in the design of new and sustainable systems for scholarly research and teaching?

Radical professionalism

“Radical professionalism” goes beyond “professionalism” and returns the latter to its deep true c... more “Radical professionalism” goes beyond “professionalism” and returns the latter to its deep true conservative sense. This is the longest of a series of posts (https://metametamedieval.com/tag/radical-professionalism ). The project started with thinking about con– and pro– words in spring 2016, in relation to local (university) current events. The first “deliverables” were some images at the end of a self-flagellating work in progress post in July, and a preamble in mid-August. Then followed two posts looking at what professionalism is not, on false values that will be very familiar to readers of Medieval allegory and satire: a first post on neutrality (false balance) and a second post about appearances (seeming, or: false being and false value(s)) and their connection to appropriateness, propriety, and property. There followed two other entremets posts. This present post looks at what professionalism is; and what, in the shape of a radical professionalism as modelled by radical academic professionals, it could be. In a fourth post, we’ll see how radical professionalism actually exists, in the world of Medieval Studies.

Make the essay Montaignian again

I worry about the kind of writing that we require of our students. Many of our students come to u... more I worry about the kind of writing that we require of our students. Many of our students come to us from schools that are more concerned with data, statistics, percentage scores, and their consequences for funding (be that public, via government support; or private, via fees); than they are about actual education. This translates to an unhealthy obsession with point-scoring and exact marking rubrics; the idea that any piece of work should be marked on a scale of 0-100; the idea that all things can and—worse—should be quantifiable and quantified. And many-to-most of our students’ main experience with longer-form writing has been the kind of essay that is taught at the secondary-school level. So as to fit with quantifiable compliance culture and the practical reality of teachers’ needs and over-stretching in a time of underfunding of education, that essay has become more and more formulaic. Yes, the kind of essay that I learned to write at school, and its French analogue the dissertation, are related; but such things were more fluid, mutable, and open back at the end of the previous century.

I worry, and I’m aware that this lament is now formally turning into a litany, about the promulgation and propagation of a kind of essay that, in its formulaic tidiness and formal fixity, is fundamentally anti-essay. As discussed in the previous post, it’s against the spirit of assaying, of trying something out, adventuring in an errantry that may well—indeed, should—include error, incompletion, unfinishedness, and failure. It’s a vital part of education to experience, experiment (the French word expérience means both), make mistakes, and fail. That’s how you learn, and now you accumulate knowledge and ways of learning and knowing that will prepare you for all the unknowns and unknowables of the rest of your life. That last post (https://metametamedieval.com/2017/08/07/make-essays-montaignian-again/) also talked about preparation as the purpose of an undergraduate education.

Make essays Montaignian again

This is a piece I wrote while teaching and therefore reading thinking about Montaigne; and readin... more This is a piece I wrote while teaching and therefore reading thinking about Montaigne; and reading how students have read and thought about a small sample of the "Essais," and how they in turn have adventured in assaying, through writing commentaries and dissertations littéraires on Montaigne.

As happens every time, I worry about a term often used in introducing Montaigne’s idea of the essay to neophytes (neophages?), as an/the “anti-essay.” Montaigne is difficult, and one of his difficulties arises when you’re teaching the "Essais" and trying not to simplify or dumb down or erase difficulty, because otherwise what you were reading together would not be Montaigne’s "Essais."

You would all miss the adventure of working on something that no-one understands completely, with everyone in the class in that same situation, working together as fellow curious people—Authoritative Faculty too—towards an End whose only known Learning Objective will be that we know a little more, mostly about what we don’t know and what thought we knew but it turns out we didn’t. It’s an exciting, dangerous adventure into unknowing and the unknown. The risk for an instructor (doing what I like, whimsically, to think of as “teaching Montaigne / literature properly”) is of showing their own limits while demonstrating raw intellectual honesty, thinking on their feet, and reading in action. That risk can be a reassurance for students, who see someone else doing literary work in live action (with all its awkwardness and clumsiness, tumbles and pratfalls, mistakes and failures), who see The Prof en ma façon simple, naturelle et ordinaire, sans contention et artifice. Mes defauts s’y liront au vif, et ma forme naïfve. They see that it’s difficult for you—yes, for you too, as difficult as it is for them—and that you’re not hiding that difficulty from them in the name of Showing Authoritative Mastery and Asserting Your Position. Difficulty, when shared, is a comfort and a consolation. We’re in this great Montaignian adventure together. We’re all the community of readers addressed as “au lecteur.”

And you would be guilty of depriving fellow intelligent adults of a great pleasure: enjoying something because it is difficult. I worry that there is less and less place for difficulty and for the active enjoyment of difficulty—properly thoughtfully carefully slowly, as work and working out (and a workout)—in universities.

Experimental medievalist teaching

A talk for the UBC Early Romance Studies research cluster about teaching a third-year undergradua... more A talk for the UBC Early Romance Studies research cluster about teaching a third-year undergraduate UBC Medieval Studies course, MDVL 301A - Medieval European Literature from the 5th to the 14th century - "The Liberal Arts" (September-December 2016). Materials from that course (except student work) are at:
http://blogs.ubc.ca/mdvl301
The first part of the talk is at:
https://metametamedieval.com/2017/01/24/experimental-medievalist-teaching-a-talk-for-ubc-early-romance-studies-research-cluster-about-mdvl301a-part-1-of-2/
The second, main, part is at the link below.
A third part reproduces the notes from one week of the class:
https://metametamedieval.com/2017/01/27/teaching-the-roman-de-la-rose-in-hyper-really-allegorical-times-apocalypse-now/

The talk was about a practical experiment in medievalist teaching. A single image of the liberal arts was at the course's beginning and end and visually centred it. Further investigation of the image—reading, research, contextualising—sets up some key questions and critical comments about education (higher / advanced and otherwise). The image is from the 12th-century "Hortus deliciarum" by Herrad of Landsberg: an encyclopaedic work containing and about knowledge, for educational purposes, written by a scholar-teacher with others (including students) as a collaborative work, in an institution of advanced learning founded in the 7th century. Not a university. Not a university academic. By people who are excluded from the medieval university, yet are persons of privilege and high rank. And yet: part of the same world of learning, composed of people and networks devoting their lives to learning; a world that is also one of lifelong learning.

The course combined three principal elements:

(1) From the 5th-century start, delimitation, confine, bounds…
---A theme: THE LIBERAL ARTS
---Through a literary work: DE NUPTIIS PHILOLOGIAE ET MERCURII
What are the liberal arts?
What is a liberal arts education at a university?
What is a university?
What are these things, what’s their point, what do they mean?
What can the medieval liberal arts tell us about its present-day relative, and how might higher education in the present day learn from its medieval cousin?

(2) From the 14th-century end of the parameters, borders again…
---A literary work, at the centre of the course: LE ROMAN DE LA ROSE
---that looked back to the 5th century (and before, and all over Europe)
---and forward to the 14th century (and into the 15th, and the first recorded debate about vernacular literature in Europe; and indeed further beyond the usual limits of the medieval)

(3) Bridging the 5th- and 14th-century “ends,” an overarching structure…
---A form: THE ROSE
---A mode: ALLEGORY
---a course that was shaped something like its material
circular and spiral shapes, wheels, and globes
---serving as a gateway (the circular Stargate, the Chinese and Bermudan Moongate) into an other world and other ways of thinking and being:
---non-linearity, rose-structures, in movement, with multiple points of view, multiplicity and polyphony and polysemy, ------allegory, and satire
---seeing and thinking imaginatively, metaphorically, poetically
---and a conjunction of creativity and criticism that can enable people to stand, defend, hope, and survive against hypocrisy and whatever else Life and Fortune send our way

50 YEARS AGO: PHILOLOGY, DECOLONISATION, DECONSTRUCTION

This is an essay about "trobar" and "trobador" in medieval Occitan, via revisiting and rereading ... more This is an essay about "trobar" and "trobador" in medieval Occitan, via revisiting and rereading a French journal article from 1966 and thinking about that time as an interesting pivotal moment in literary, critical, and cultural history: Richard Lemay, « À propos de l’origine arabe de l’art des troubadours », Annales. Économies, sociétés, civilisations, 21.5 (1966): 991. Which, in turn, looked back to philological scholarship of a century before.

It also contains assorted other things (such as unicorns) and, like other such writing, is a working experiment on the transpositions and translation; and the intersection and integration; of twitter, blogs, and other online commentary.

And it's thinking about histories of reading and of scholarship on literature (and hoping to plant seeds for others to water, cultivate, and share fruits and further seeds in turn); and looking forward to futures; including calls for papers for medieval Occitan sessions at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo next year. One of which is a round-table on TROBAR.

Occitan Lyric Poetry as Defence Against the Dark Arts

This paper is a reading of Maria de Ventadorn and Gui d'Uisel's tenso/partimen, "Gui d'Uicel, be... more This paper is a reading of Maria de Ventadorn and Gui d'Uisel's tenso/partimen, "Gui d'Uicel, be.m peza de vos" (PC 295.1=194.9; c.1196-98). Maria asks whether a lady "ought to do equally for her lover as he ought for her" (Linda Paterson's translation of ll. 5-7: "deu far engualmen/dona per drut, quan lo.i quer franchamen/com el per leis"). Topics can, from here, be teased out: equity, reciprocity, and relationship; and their relations to larger matters of seduction, sincerity, playful seriousness, serious play, and the point of debate-poetry.

After Maria's opening, Gui chooses the side he will argue, "engualmen"; Maria argues for a contrary position. These are neither the only positions available, nor the only argumentative options: the poem is a game whose players act out parts which are more interesting when more challenging. What is expressed does not bear any necessary relation to actual persons and their world, but it is illuminating that the poem's arguments and ideas are expressed as is the way in which they are expressed. An intertextual network--other debate-poems by Gui, or invoking Maria as judge, and thematically-and codicologically-related partimens--weaves together equity (ex. "engualmen") and its contraries (ex. "fals cor ni trichador") revealing a critique of sexual and courtly cultures.

"Tornar, tensos, razonar": tensions are defused, and poetic brio and flirtatious wit turn attack to abstracted exchange and playful eroticism, in a forum for open discussion, an equitable safe space for free expression through role-play and hypothetical exploration including gender fluidity and motility. Translated to our contemporary context of university communities confronting issues of equity, safety, and sexual assault, the debate-poem offers modes of engagement for "seducating" against rape culture.

This essay is a version (slightly expanded) of a talk given at the 15th Triennial Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society; University of Kentucky, Lexington; 24-29 July 2016; the original abstract is above.

It includes a selection of medieval Occitan poetry (with Englishings) that might be interesting and perhaps even useful to general readers, feminists, anti-rape activists, paranomasiacs, comedians, and assorted other 21st century live human beings (and any other intelligences not covered above).

There are also pictures.

Including, as promised to a certain amic, owls.

Constructing and deconstructing a medieval joke (part 2 of 2)

Continuing part 1: text and context around the image concerned, including attempts to reconstruct... more

Constructing and deconstructing a medieval joke (part 1 of 2)

Warnings: ---May contain jokes ---Does not contain any jokes about construction ---Does not know... more Warnings:

---May contain jokes
---Does not contain any jokes about construction
---Does not knowingly contain any actual deconstruction
---Images and words may be NSFW (not just because they’re medieval)
---Contains double entendres

This piece started out on Twitter. The medieval object at its centre (as it were) is also, as it happens, a nice neat introduction to the idea of a “text” as a woven knitted textile that’s not just words and that moves around and is moved around by a reader, used, shaped into making sense, manœuvred and manipulated (so to speak). Yes, that makes a very serious thing—The Medieval—look very unserious. Yes, there will be more of that sort of topsy-turvy humour. Yes, some of it will be “low”… or will it? is “low” really “low?” Can even the wheel of Dame Fortune tell? (A most diverting Medieval AI problem for the history of SF.)

The thing we’ll see is also a fine illustration of how a planche in a bande dessinée works: much of what I’ve been doing and reading on Twitter is thinking through how BD is and works, through reading others’ tweets and seeing myself working with conjunctions of text, image, sequence, direction, framing, and marginalities. Yes, this makes something often seen as not serious—cartoons, graphic novels, bande dessinée—serious; in interwoven counterpoint to preconceptions, idées fixes / reçues about the medieval. There may be more such posts through the summer while I’m figuring out the January 2017 FREN 336 course, with posts like this one here running parallel or as marginal commentary to the building of the actual course itself.

On kindness, curiosity, and worrying

This piece is about "Game of Thrones" and the ethics of reading, reception, and discussion; conne... more

"Flamenca" at #Kzoo2016 (1) and (2)

(1) The Old Occitan "Romance of Flamenca" has long been known, to Occitanists and other similarly... more (1) The Old Occitan "Romance of Flamenca" has long been known, to Occitanists and other similarly fine noble persons of taste and distinction as A Good Thing. And fine, noble, etc.

It has been growing in repute. Part of that is its availability in four new paperback editions and translations, all in the last ten years. In Medievalist, publication, and book-historical terms this is Major. At this year's International Congress on Medieval Studies, then, "Flamenca" was the topic of a roundtable discussion.

Here was the call for papers:

The Société Guilhem IX invites parties interested in discussing the romance of Flamenca to join a roundtable for the International Medieval Congress in May, 2016. Discussions by participants are limited to 10 minutes to ensure to encourage exchange between participants and also with listeners.

The important Occitan romance, Flamenca, has received quite a bit of attention of late. The romance was translated and edited in 2008 for an Italian-reading audience in Flamenca: romanzo occitano del XIII secolo by Roberta Manetti. Anton Espadaler has recently produced the first modern Catalan translation of the text while Jaime Covarsi Carbonero’s translation into Spanish was published in 2010. The excellent translation-editions produced by Lettres gothiques have also added Flamenca to the collection with an edition/translation produced by Zufferey and Fasseur in late 2014.

And here is my abstract:

“New editions: history reading Flamenca, reading Flamenca’s history, Flamenca reading history” [... read the first of the pair of posts for that, and notes, and so on...]

(2) Notes from that round-table session on the 13th-century Occitan romance of "Flamenca," at the 51st International Congress on Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo). Tidied-up fuller version of my contribution to the panel.

On early science fiction / SF

There has long been an intimate relationship between science fiction and fantasy; and between the... more There has long been an intimate relationship between science fiction and fantasy; and between them and other kinds of imaginative speculative fictions (perhaps a more useful sense of “SF”) set in alternate worlds and alternative realities. Gothic, dark tales, horror, weird fictions, new weird, cyberpunk, steampunk, slipstream, utopia, dystopia, ecotopia… And post-forms, splits and splinters and schisms, and pullings back together; in waves and fashions and fads of self-identification and re-identification, struggles with anxieties of influence, and reaffirmations of just being in a long literary continuum: at the end of the day, storytelling that stirs its audience and feeds a basic human appetite: imagination.

This is a piece about reading and readers: and about fiction as something inclusive, appealing to a wide range of potential readers, across tastes and preconceptions from previous reading, across cultures and physical space, and across time.

It was written in reaction to and comment on an article that appeared in "The Guardian" on 2016-05-23: "Work from 1616 is 'the first ever science fiction novel'
The Chemical Wedding, a fantastical story of Rosicrucianism by Johann Valentin Andreae, pioneered the genre, says author who has written a new version."

Credo (2): mashup remix: #4wordpedagogy + #UBC100

A continuation of credo (1): which was essentially a statement of teaching philosophy, as academi... more A continuation of credo (1): which was essentially a statement of teaching philosophy, as academic outreach, featuring few words most of which are via Tweets. It is also a contribution to #UBC100. I do not have much to give. I am not financially wealthy. But I can offer other riches—as can any faculty and many other members of the universitas that is the university community—riches beyond a banker’s wildest dreams or a property magnate’s most far-sighted imaginative speculations.

A statement of teaching philosophy, then.

Or: what is the point of it all?

Or: why am I here?

Or: why are we all here?

Or indeed: why am I?

The continuation in (2) includes visual metaphors in answer to these same questions, and then a curated compilation of my own and others' contributions to the Twitter #4wordpedagogy collection, an interactive networked collaborative compendium of knowledge.

It also features Princeton University's 2016 Strategic Plan, which offers alternative routes (service, sustainability, stewardship) out of the destructive impasse of neoliberalism. Also Elvis, Yoda, "The 100," and the applied medievalism of commentated manuscript and other images.

#4wordpedagogy resulted in a great collective work in the form of a graph (at https://nodexlgraphgallery.org/Pages/Graph.aspx?graphID=67608 ); with participants not just as static “information points & nodes” but as dynamic interactive “vertices,” in which I had the happy honour to be a Top 10 Vertex (and maybe also a Vortex), Ranked By Betweenness Centrality.

Credo for universal lifelong higher education (1)

This post is essentially a statement of teaching philosophy, as academic outreach, featuring few ... more This post is essentially a statement of teaching philosophy, as academic outreach, featuring few words most of which are via Tweets. It is also a contribution to #UBC100, the centennial celebrations of my home institution. I do not have much to give. I am not financially wealthy. But I can offer other _riches_—as can any faculty and many other members of the _universitas_ that is the university community—riches beyond a banker’s wildest dreams or a property magnate’s most far-sighted imaginative speculations.

A statement of teaching philosophy, then.

Or: what is the point of it all?

Or: why am I here?

Or: why are we all here?

Or indeed: why am I?

Like many other faculty, students, others in our local community, and any concerned civic-minded citizens who care: I wonder about these things. About our university and about universities more generally. And I wonder at them, for they are things of wonder. Actually, just asking questions about anything at all is already in itself a thing of wonder.

#marking

About marking, in more than one sense, including commemoration and remembrance. Contains some ide... more

On applied medievalism and being more like whales

An essay about applied medievalism and innovation: on Twitter as virtual scholarly community and ... more

On good government

This piece started out as some Tweets. It is intended as a friendly useful guide to our Board of ... more This piece started out as some Tweets. It is intended as a friendly useful guide to our Board of Governors on the art of good government; be that as is, or in using ideas from it and adapting them to new ideas of governance. Medievalists are, as ever, here to help in the here and now …

UBC, a public university, is currently celebrating its centenary. And in the midst of governance crises. Here are two reasons why some frescos in a council chamber can help.

---GOOD GOVERNMENT (1): A NEW TRANSLATION
---TRANSLATION (2): CONTEXT, RECONTEXTUALISATION, & TRANSCRIPTION INTO PHYSICAL PRACTICE

Ambrogio Lorenzetti, The Allegory of Good Government (Sala dei Nove, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena: 1338-39)

#UBCLEAN #TUUMEST

On the grassroots collective protest on 2 February 2016 at UBC against the Board of Governors. Th... more On the grassroots collective protest on 2 February 2016 at UBC against the Board of Governors. This protest was about a lack of transparency; failures in accountability; the holding of secret, undocumented meetings; and included a request for external review of said Board and its practices.

The protest's medievalism:

---use of appropriate heraldic colours
---use of transparency
---dress code: academic regalia, lab coats, dress up as your academic area, scholarly cosplay
---use of visual/verbal puns (and more, and parody and pastiche and satire, that were omitted as deemed too subtle for our audience)

MEDIEVALISING MODERN FRENCH LANGUAGE TEACHING / SUICIDE AWARENESS DAY

A two-part class on the imperfect. With #poeticfemfog

#UBCSAAM 2016-01-25 VIRTUAL TEACH-IN (2)

(2) RESOURCES / TEACHING MATERIALS Featuring ---Some current parallels, like #femfog in the Med... more