Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe (born July 30, 1948) is an American medievalist specializing in Old English.
Her work focuses on orality and literacy, manuscript cultures, and questions of embodiment and agency in Old English and Anglo-Latin literature.
[3] In 1990, O'Brien O'Keeffe's book Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse appeared from Cambridge University Press,[4] introducing the idea of "transitional literacy" to debates about the orality of Old English poetry.
In 2008, she became the Clyde and Evelyn Slusser Professor of English at UC Berkeley.
[7] Her book Stealing Obedience: Narratives of Agency and Identity in Later Anglo-Saxon England appeared from University of Toronto Press in 2012.