James O'Sullivan

Prof. James O’Sullivan conducts empirical research on literature and culture, reads digital fiction and literary games, and explores the changing nature of culture and cultural production in the digital age. He is Professor of Digital Culture & Cultural Analytics at University College Cork.

Prof. O’Sullivan is a graduate of University College Cork, University College Dublin, and Cork Institute of Technology. Prior to joining UCC, he held faculty positions at the University of Sheffield and Pennsylvania State University. He has also taught in adjunct capacities at Cork Institute of Technology and Washington State University Vancouver and has held visiting fellowships at NOVA University Lisbon and Trinity College Dublin.

Major grant-funded projects he has led include CASCADE, a Horizon Europe MSCA Doctoral Network developed to train early career researchers in cultural and text analytics, C21 Editions, jointly funded by the Irish Research Council (IRC) and the UK-based Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and Minimal Curation, funded by Research Ireland.

He is the author of Towards a Digital Poetics (Palgrave Macmillan 2019) and the editor of Digital Editing & Publishing in the Twenty-first Century (Scottish Universities Press 2025), The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Digital Humanities (Bloomsbury 2023), Technology in Irish Literature & Culture (Cambridge University Press 2023), Digital Art in Ireland: New Media & Irish Artistic Practice (Anthem Press 2021), Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities: Contexts, Forms, & Practices (Bloomsbury 2021), and Reading Modernism with Machines (Palgrave Macmillan 2016). His research has appeared in a number of international peer-reviewed publications, including Poetics, Leonardo, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Humanities & Social Sciences Communications, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and the International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing.

Prof. O'Sullivan has made significant contributions to public policy. He has served as a secondee to the Higher Education Authority as their Teaching & Learning Policy Advisor for Artificial Intelligence, and was invited by the Government of Ireland to appear before the Joint Committee on Tourism, Culture, Arts, Sport and Media to provide expert submission on the Broadcasting (Amendment) Bill 2023.

As a creative writer, he has been published in numerous periodicals and anthologies, including The Stinging Fly, The SHOp, Cyphers, and Southword. Prof. O’Sullivan contributes regular articles and features to a variety of periodicals, and has published in The Guardian, Noema, The Irish Times, and the LA Review of Books.

He is Chair of the Board of Sample-Studios, Cork's largest artist-led studio group, which provides shared, affordable facilities for arts practitioners from a variety of disciplines. He is a member of the Irish Federation of University Teachers (IFUT).