Dr 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 Senior Lecturer at the Department of Digital Humanities, University College Cork. He currently serves on the Research & Innovation Committee for UCC's College of Arts, Celtic Studies & Social Sciences, and as a member of the inaugural board of the Future Humanities Institute, for which he convenes the Digital Cultures, New Media, & Cultural Analytics research cluster.
Dr 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.
He is currently Lead Researcher on CASCADE, a Horizon Europe MSCA Doctoral Network developed to train early career researchers in cultural and text analytics for identifying and interrogating how meaning is expressed in language across diverse contexts, as well as Principal Investigator for C21 Editions: Editing & Publishing in the Digital Age, jointly funded by the Irish Research Council (IRC) and the UK-based Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC).
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, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Digital Humanities Quarterly, the International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, and Digital Studies/Le Champ Numérique.
Dr 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. Dr O’Sullivan contributes regular articles and features to a variety of periodicals, and has published in The Guardian, 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).