Kathleen C. O'Brien

Katie O’Brien is Assistant Professor of Practice in the School of Global Studies. Dr. O’Brien teaches courses on Latin American studies, religion, gender, sexuality, and feminism. She is also the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the School of Global Studies.

Dr. O'Brien holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, a Master of Arts degree in Latin American Studies from the University of Arizona, and a BA degree in Sociology and Anthropology from Carleton College. Her dissertation research explores how multiple generations of indigenous evangelicals negotiate religious identity and gender relations in the long-term aftermath of conversion in the Ecuadorian Andes. She conducted fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Chimborazo Province, the site of a mass conversion of indigenous peoples from Catholicism to evangelical Protestantism in the 1960s and 1970s. Dr. O’Brien has received funding from the Social Science Research Council to conduct research as well as Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowships to study Quechua. She has presented her research at numerous academic conferences, including the annual meetings of the Latin American Studies Association and the American Anthropological Association.