Professor O’Brien is a Ph.D. candidate at Rutgers University, where he is completing his dissertation, “Valuable Service: A Study of William Trumbull, English Agent to the Court of the Spanish Habsburgs, 1605-1625.”He examines the intersection of confessional identity, international politics, and court intrigue in the first three decades of the seventeenth-century. He received his B.A. from Georgetown University, and he has an M.A. in History from Fordham University.