René Ostberg

René Ostberg is an associate editor at Encyclopaedia Britannica covering literature, popular music, and Catholicism. She worked at Britannica as a copy editor from 2004 to 2008 before returning as an editor in 2023. 

René has published nonfiction, fiction, and poetry in many different publications, including America, Sojourners, Next Avenue, U.S. Catholic, National Catholic Reporter, Brevity, Hobart, Memoir Mixtapes, and Literary Orphans.

She earned an associate's degree in culinary arts from Triton College in River Grove, Illinois, followed by a bachelor's in English (with a concentration on Irish studies) from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. Her first publishing job was as an assistant cookbook editor at a Chicago-based publisher. In the 1990s and early 2000s René spent extensive time living and working in Ireland (on the Aran Islands off the western coast and in County Down in the North). She has also completed graduate work in Irish literature and history at Boston College.

Some of René's favorite articles that she has worked on at Britannica include MacGuffin, Magdalene laundry, Disco Demolition Night, Bret Easton Ellis, Bloomsday, Min Jin Lee, Dante's Inferno, Sturgill Simpson, Fran Lebowitz, Indigenous writers of the U.S. and Canada, Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, Jericho Brown, the Catholic imagination, and who invented the double-helix staircase (was it really Leonardo da Vinci?). Call her tastes eclectic.