About

Robert Viking O'Brien is an emeritus professor of English literature at California State University, Chico. He has written about Shakespeare, Renaissance literature, travel and exploration, and Melanesian folklore.

After serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Solomon Islands, he earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, where he was awarded a MacLeish Scholarship, a Humanities Fellowship, and an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship. O'Brien has taught over three thousand students in Chico, in Chico State's London Semester program, in the Semester at Sea program, at a Buddhist temple school in Thailand, and as a Fulbright Scholar at Eötvös József College and Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest.

He lives in Manhattan and Portsmouth, New Hampshire.