University College Cork

Dr James O'Sullivan is based in the Department of Digital Humanities, part of the School of English & Digital Humanities, at University College Cork (UCC). He conducts empirical research on and teaches across literature and culture; reads digital fiction and literary games; and explores the changing nature of culture and cultural production in the digital age.

Dr O'Sullivan's major book projects include his monograph Towards a Digital Poetics (Palgrave Macmillan 2019), as well as The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Digital Humanities (Bloomsbury 2023), Digital Art in Ireland: New Media and Irish Artistic Practice (Anthem Press 2021), Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities: Contexts, Forms, and Practices (Bloomsbury 2021), and Reading Modernism with Machines: Digital Humanities and Modernist Literature (Palgrave Macmillan 2016). He has published in all of the major peer-reviewed journals in the digital humanities, including Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Poetics: Journal of Empirical Research on Culture, Digital Studies/Le Champ Numérique, and the International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing. He is the Irish Principal Investigator for C21 Editions: Editing and Publishing in the Digital Age, a three-year international collaboration funded by the Irish Research Council (IRC) and the UK-based Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

For his complete research profile, see:

Dr O'Sullivan fulfils a number of senior roles at UCC. He serves on the Research & Innovation Committee for the College of Arts, Celtic Studies & Social Sciences (CACSSS); the Social Research Ethics Committee (SREC); and the Board of Directors for the Future Humanities Institute (FHI). He is the Director of Research for the School of English & Digital Humanities; School Champion for Research on the University Leadership Team’s Sub-committee for Research-Innovation Strategy & Impact; and Convener of the Future Humanities Institute's research cluster on Digital Cultures, New Media, and Cultural Analytics. Dr O'Sullivan leads the Digital Inclusion Initiative in CACSSS, as well as represents the College at UCC's Inclusion Steering Group.

Dr O'Sullivan has conducted external examinations and reviews at many international institutions, including the University of Bergen and the University of Kent, and has been appointed to expert referee panels by the Research Council of Norway (RCN) and the National Science Centre, Poland (NCN). He directs DHSI Atlantic, UCC's international training network for the digital arts and humanities. He was previously the Associate Director of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI), the world's largest DH training network, hosted annually at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, for six years, from 2013 to 2019. Dr O'Sullivan has previously held faculty positions at the University of Sheffield and Pennsylvania State University and has taught in an adjunct capacity at Cork Institute of Technology and Washington State University, Vancouver. Dr O'Sullivan has held visiting fellowships at NOVA University, Lisbon, and Trinity College Dublin. He chaired the first and only instance of the Electronic Literature Organization’s annual conference and media arts festival to be held in Ireland, ELO2019. He is a member of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) and the Irish Federation of University Teachers (IFUT).

He is on the board of Sample-Studios, Cork's largest artist-led studio group, which nurtures a creative environment and provides shared, affordable facilities for arts practitioners from a variety of disciplines. Dr O'Sullivan contributes regular articles and features to periodicals like The Guardian, The Irish Times, The Conversation, RTÉ Brainstorm, and the LA Review of Books. As a creative writer, he has been published in numerous periodicals and anthologies, including The Stinging Fly, The SHOp, and Cyphers. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Courting Katie (Salmon Poetry 2017).