Maggie O'Brien

MA in French, DePaul University (2020)
​BA in French, DePaul University (2019)

• Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Francophone literature​

• Diaspora literature

• Autofiction, childhood memoir and identity formation

• Translation studies

• Foreign language pedagogy

Maggie O’Brien joined the French program at DePaul University as an instructor in 2020. She earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in French at DePaul, with coursework focused on foreign language pedagogy, translation studies and literary analysis.

In addition to her teaching at DePaul, Maggie has taught elementary and intermediate French courses at Northwestern University. She also serves as an academic advisor at the Kellstadt Graduate School of Business at DePaul.

Maggie’s research focuses on twentieth and twenty-first century Francophone African, Caribbean and Maghreb literature, with interests in diaspora literature, childhood memoir, autofiction and the intersections of trauma, memory and identity. Maggie successfully defended her master’s thesis entitled La mise en page de l’enfant déraciné : l’identité, la mémoire et l’autofiction. This analysis compares narratives of displacement in childhood through works of autofiction by Gaël Faye, Gisèle Pineau and Zahia Rahmani, specifically the role of mothers and maternal figures and their influence on the narrator’s self-formation and sense of belonging.