About Annamarie O’Brien
Hello! I am Annamarie O’Brien, a doctoral student in the American Studies program at Penn State Harrisburg. I received my B.A. with High Honors from the University of Michigan in 2010, where I studied Arts & Ideas in the Humanities (with concentrations in Contemporary Visual Culture and Fine Art). My undergraduate interests culminated in an interdisciplinary thesis project examining the performance and aesthetic of video-blogs.
I continued to explore contemporary visual culture in the Department of Popular Culture at Bowling Green State University, where I served as a Graduate Instructor of “Introduction to Popular Culture” classes for two years before graduating in 2013. My Master’s thesis, entitled “Mind Over Matter: Expressions of Mind/Body Dualism in Thinspiration,” examines attitudes toward the body as expressed online in pro-eating disorder imagery. I have published a chapter on contemporary Orientalism online in Popular Culture in the 21st Century (Barker and Wiatrowski eds. 2013), and have presented work at various conferences, including the San Diego International Comic-Con, Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association conferences, the Ray Browne Conference on Cultural and Critical Studies, and Graphicity at the Université de Montréal.
As a doctoral student at Penn State University Harrisburg I am continuing to study the intersections of popular culture, new media, visual culture, internet communities, folklore and gender.
Feel free to download and examine my abridged academic and professional résumé–if you have any inquiries, please contact me by email at anmarobrien@gmail.com.