Visible Mód: The Scholarship of Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe

Summary

BY AN extraordinary stroke of luck, I began my academic career in 1996 as the junior colleague of Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe. I became certain of my good fortune after a few months at Notre Dame, when one of the graduate student medievalists confided to me that she and her peers had nicknamed Katherine ‘Obi-wan Kenobi’. The name was, of course, a play on Katherine's famous initials, ‘Kobok’, but it also identified her as a wise Jedi master for young medievalists: brilliant, immensely learned, kind – and more than a match for the Darth Vaders her students (and junior colleagues) might encounter. Indeed, to extend the comparison, if Star Wars: Episode IV narrated the revival of the Jedi knighthood under the leadership of Obi-wan, it was similarly under Katherine's leadership between 1993 and 2008 that an extraordinary revival of Medieval Studies in the English Department at Notre Dame was designed and implemented. Nor did her leadership stop there. Katherine was the first-ever woman to chair the English Department at Notre Dame, and shortly after her arrival at Berkeley, she was asked both to chair the English Department and to direct the Medieval Studies Program. Like Obi-wan, she seemed to have superhuman abilities to juggle these demanding jobs, teach courses, mentor graduate students, and to sustain a demanding research agenda. Obi-wan Kenobi tapped into the Force, a mysterious power that enabled adherents to perform impossible feats. But for medievalists, Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe is the Force that has animated, energized, and protected our joint enterprise – both at the university level and across the disciplines of Old English and Medieval Studies.

This essay focuses on Katherine's work as a scholar of Old English and Anglo-Latin. But the essential qualities that make Katherine a remarkable leader and program-builder lie at the root of her ground-breaking research. She combines brilliance in the kind of work traditional to her field (linguistic expertise, paleographical precision, an almost eidetic recall of the manuscripts and texts on which she has worked, an extraordinary gift for textual analysis, all rooted in her formidable logic) with a stunning scholarly creativity that sees around corners and across cruces.