Peter D. O’Neill is an Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and Intercultural Studies, Franklin College of Arts & Science, at the University of Georgia in Athens. He has served as a Lilly Teaching Fellow and as a Research Fellow of the university’s Willson Center for Humanities and Arts.

O’Neill’s Famine Irish and the American Racial State, published by Routledge in 2017, recently earned Honorable Mention in the “Donald Murphy Prize for Distinguished First Books,” presented by the American Conference for Irish Studies. He has co-edited, with Marguérite Corporaal and Jason King, the essay collection, The Famine Diaspora and Irish American Women’s Writing, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). He is the co-editor, with David Lloyd, of The Black and Green Atlantic: Crosscurrents of the African and Irish Diasporas, a 2009 essay collection also published by Palgrave Macmillan.  O’Neill’s other publications include articles in journals such as Atlantic Studies: Global Currents, the Irish Studies Review, and the Journal of American Studies.

O’Neill’s courses have included Western World Literature, Asian-American Literature, Comparative Ethnic American Literature, The Black and Green Atlantic: Crosscurrents of the Irish and African Diasporas, Multicultural Black Diaspora Literature, Comparative Cultural Studies, Comparative Postcolonial Studies, 19th Century Transatlantic Literature and the Nation-State, Transnational Literatures, and a First-Year Odyssey Seminar, Soccer: The Global Language of Love and War. His research interests include comparative ethnic American literature, transnational literary studies,  Irish diaspora studies, Irish American cultural history, postcolonial theory, and the racial state.

He earned his Ph.D. in English from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where his honors included a Feuchtwanger Foundation Fellowship and a Provost’s Arts and Humanities Initiative Grant. He also holds an M.A. degree in English (Creative Writing) from San Francisco State University in California, along with a B.A. degree in Sociology from Leeds University in England.

Prior to joining the University of Georgia faculty in 2011, O’Neill was a Lecturer in American Studies at the University of California, Davis; a Tutor and Assistant Lecturer in Writing at the University of Southern California; a Lecturer in English at San Francisco State University; and an Instructor in the English department at Pôle Universitaire Léonard de Vinci, Paris, France. He is a cofounder and former artistic director of the Irish Arts Foundation and the Fifth Province theater company in San Francisco.

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