Tracy O'Brien

Tracy O’Brien is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at the University of Toronto where she is completing a collaborative specialization in Book History & Print Culture. She holds master’s degrees in Linguistics and English from Memorial University of Newfoundland & Labrador and is leveraging her multidisciplinary training to complete her dissertation, “A Corpus Study of Language Variation in Early Modern Women’s Writing,” in which she examines linguistic structures women writers used in their compositions between the mid-16th and late-17th centuries. This research is supported by a fellowship with the Critical Digital Humanities Initiative at University of Toronto. Tracy is an RA for Daniel Newman’s A Narratology of Science project, where she searches corpora of scientific articles for relevant grammatical and syntactic patterns. She is founder and coordinator of the Early Modern Research and Reading Group and spends her summers writing theatre reviews. Her non-academic life involves a lot of family, music, dogs, plants, laughter, and Star Trek.