Associate Researcher
Michael O’Sullivan is an academic and writer based in Hong Kong. He has published 15 books and works broadly in the humanities, focusing on comparative literature, education and inequality and intercultural humanities. He is also a creative writer. His poems and essays have appeared in Cha, Voice and Verse, Hong Kong 20/20: Reflections on a borrowed place and his first novel will appear in 2021.
After studying fine art and then chemical engineering for 2 years at the Cork Institute of Technology, Ireland, Michael O'Sullivan went on to take BA (English and Psychology) and MA (English) degrees at the National University of Ireland, Cork. He then received an EAP scholarship to study at the graduate school of English at the University of California, Berkeley for the 2000/2001 academic year. He completed his PhD at the National University of Ireland, Cork in 2004 after being awarded an Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences award for 2001-2003. He has taught on language and literature for the National University of Ireland, Cork, the Open University in the UK, the Upward Bound Program of the University of California, Berkeley, Nagoya University of Commerce and Business, Japan and The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Some of his recent books include Cloneliness: on the reproduction of loneliness (Bloomsbury); The Humanities and the Irish University (Manchester University Press); Weakness: a literary and philosophical history (Bloomsbury); The Incarnation of Language: Joyce, Proust and a philosophy of the flesh (Continuum); Michel Henry: Incarnation, Barbarism, and Belief (Peter Lang); Affecting Irishness: Negotiating Cultural Identity within and beyond the Nation (Peter Lang). He has also published widely on literature and related fields in such journals as Parallax, Mosaic, Textual Practice and Nottingham French Studies.
He has convened (with colleagues) a number of international conferences, including Affecting Irishness (Trinity College, Dublin, 2004), an international Beckett conference at the National University of Ireland, Cork, in 2006, and "The Future of English in Asia" held at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2013.
Research Interests
Comparative literature, humanities education, modernism, phenomenology & literature, literature & philosophy, Irish studies, the philosophy of education, literature and emotions, Michel Henry, James Joyce
Selected Publications
Books
2020
The Value of the Humanities in Higher Education: Perspectives from Hong Kong. Authors: Chan, E., Mak, F.K.Y., Thomas, Y.S.H., Hu, Y., O'Sullivan, M., Tay, E. Singapore: Springer, 2020.
2019
Cloneliness: on the reproduction of loneliness. New York: Bloomsbury
2016
The humanities in contemporary Chinese contexts. London: Springer, 2016 (with Evelyn Chan).
Edited Journals
Editorial Board for British and Irish Literature – Oxford Bibliographies
Articles and Chapters
2018
Michael O’Sullivan (2018) Loneliness as method: Henry James, individualism and the ‘more intimate education’, Textual Practice, DOI:
10.1080/0950236X.2018.1508492
2017
"David Foster Wallace, loneliness, and the "pretty much nothing" the university teaches" Literature Compass. Vol. 14. Issue 7. Wiley. 2017.
2016
"Academic barbarism and the literature of concealment: Roberto Bolaño and W. G. Sebald" Academic barbarism, universities and inequality. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
2016
"Incarnation and shame: Reading Richard Swinburne on Jesus' "divided mind" in light of Christian phenomenology and T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets". Cogent Art and Humanities. Taylor & Francis. Volume 3, Issue 1, 2016.
2016
"Bringing them into the Fold: Deleuze and three images for an east-west humanities." Deleuze and the New Humanities. Ed. Rose Braidotti.
2016
"Educational inequalities in higher education in Hong Kong" (with Michael Tsang) Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. 2016.
2015
"Loneliness and the Submerged Population: Frank O'Connor's The Lonely Voice and Joyce's 'The Dead'". The Irish Short Story. Ed. Elke D’Hoker. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2015.
2014
"Singular Celibates: Narrative Seduction in Moore and Joyce" in George Moore : artistic visions and literary worlds. Ed. Mary Pierse. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 206-19
2013
"On the new Chinese Translation of Finnegans Wake". James Joyce Quarterly, 50.4, pp. 1095-99.
2013
"The Sentimental Kindness of Criticism: and Joyce's 'cup of kindest yet'" Textual Practice, 27:2, 295-314, 2013.
2012
"Beckett and the 'authentic weakness of being'" in Beckett Re-Membered: After the Centenary. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing (edited with James Carney, Leonard Madden and Karl White), 2012.
2012
Introduction. Beckett Re-Membered: After the Centenary. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing (edited with James Carney, Leonard Madden and Karl White), 2012.
2010
"Giving Up Control: Narrative Authority and Animal Experience in Coetzee and Kafka", Mosaic, 2010.
2010
"Giving Flesh; The Gift of Weakness," Parallax. 16.1. January-March 2010, pp. 56-67.
2009
"Limning the Liminal, Thinking the Threshold: Irish Studies' Approach to Theory," in Liminal Borderlands in Irish Literature and Culture. Reimagining Ireland. Vol. 9. Eds. Irene Gilsenin Nordin & Edin Holmsten. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009, pp. 17-34.
2007
"Taking Reading Hostage: Ethical Criticism's Rhetoric of Alterity". Nagoya University of Commerce and Business Administration Journal of Language, Communication and Culture, March, 2007.
2006
"L'Université sans profession (the unemployed university): The Privilege of the Conflict of the Faculties" Parallax, 12.3, July 2006, pp. 112-24.
2005
"Narrative". The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005, 13: 98-111.
2005
"Metaphor's Lost Time: Notes on the new translations of Proust" Nottingham French Studies, Vol. 44 No. 2, Summer 2005, pp. 31-41.
2005
"Metaphor's Lost Time: Notes on the new translations of Proust" Nottingham French Studies, Vol. 44 No. 2, Summer 2005, pp. 31-41.
2005
"'Bare Life' and the Garden Politics of Roethke and Heaney" Mosaic, 17.4, December 2005, pp. 17-34.
2005
"The Irish Tenor: Metaphor and its Voice in Irish Criticism" New Voices in Irish Criticism 5 (Four Courts Press, Dublin 2005).
Reviews
2013
O'Sullivan, Michael. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. 4th Ed. Roland Greene, editor in chief; Stephen Cushman, general editor, Clare Cavanagh, Jahan Ramazani & Paul Rouzer, associate editors. Asian Cha. March, 2013.
2012
O'Sullivan, Michael. "Irish Autobiography: Stories of Self in the Narrative of a Nation". Life Writing. Vol. 9.4, 2012.
2010
O'Sullivan, Michael. "Narratives of Class in New Irish and Scottish Literature: from Joyce to Kelman, Doyle, Galloway, and Mcnamee (review)." Mfs Modern Fiction Studies. 56.3 (2010): 647-650. Print.
2005
O'Sullivan, Michael. "Acts of Narrative (review)." Mfs Modern Fiction Studies. 51.3 (2005): 724-727. Print.
2004
Agamben, Giorgio, and Michael O'Sullivan. "Reviews – the Open: Man and Animal." Radical Philosophy. (2004): 54. Print.
Creative Writing
2016
"When Miguel de Cervantes met William Shakespeare" Quixotica. Hong Kong: Chameleon Press, 2016.
2015
"Dead Wood" in Desde Hong Kong: poets in conversation with Octavio Paz. Chameleon Press, Hong Kong, 2015.
2015
"The King" in Desde Hong Kong: poets in conversation with Octavio Paz. Chameleon Press, Hong Kong, 2015
2014
"On meeting the mother of MichaelAngelo" Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. Hong Kong: June 2014 (issue 24). Internet Resource.
2010
"Stranger" Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. Hong Kong: February 2010 (issue 10). Internet resource.
Research Grants and Awards
2018
R-Portion Grant for a Borders Conference: 30,000 HKD
2018
R-Portion Grant for an LMU-CUHK Exchange Conference: 40,000 HKD
2016
Co-Investigator in University Grants Committee Project entitled "The Economic Value of the Humanities in Hong Kong": 758,000HKD
2015
Pilot Study Grant: 40,000HKD
2015
Young Researcher of the Year. The Faculty of Arts, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. 100,000HKD
2015
Direct Grant: 22,000 HKD. The Chinese University of Hong Kong
2014
The Young Researcher Award 2014 – The Chinese University of Hong Kong
2012
Direct Grant. 56,000 HKD. The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
2011-2012
Faculty of Arts Humanities Fellowship, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
