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Department of English Studies

Academic Staff

Professor Michael O'Neill

Telephone: +44 (0) 191 33 42582
Fax: +44 (0) 191 33 42501
Room number: Room 101, Hallgarth House

(email at m.s.o'neill@durham.ac.uk)

Biography

Michael O’Neill is Professor of English. He was Head of Department from 1997 to 2000 and from 2002 to 2005. From 2005-11, he was a Director (Arts and Humanities) of the Institute of Advanced Study (IAS) at Durham University; he  served as the Acting Executive Director of the IAS from January 2011 until May 2012. He is a Founding Fellow of the English Association, on the Editorial Boards of the Keats-Shelley Review, Romantic Circles, Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, Romanticism, and The Wordsworth Circle, and Chair of the International Byron Society's Advisory Board.  In 2005 he established and is Director of an intra-departmental research group working on Romantic Dialogues and Legacies.

Professor O’Neill has published books, editions, chapters, and articles on many aspects of Romantic literature, especially the work of Percy Bysshe Shelley, on Victorian poetry, and on an array of British, Irish, and American twentieth- and twenty-first-century poets. His research has concentrated on questions of literary achievement and of poetic influence, dialogue, and legacy. Books published since RAE2008 include Wheel (Arc, 2008), a collection of poems, and, as editor, The Cambridge History of English Poetry (2010).  He is also the co-editor (with Madeleine Callaghan) of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry: Hardy to Mahon (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) in the Guides to Criticism series, of which he is the general editor, the co-author (with Michael D. Hurley) of Poetic Form for CUP ( 2012), and the co-editor (with Anthony Howe and with the assistance of Madeleine Callaghan) of The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley (2013).  Professor O'Neill is writing a book on Shakespeare and English Poetry for OUP.

He is an associate editor on the multi-volume Johns Hopkins edition of Shelley's poetry (the third volume appeared in 2012) and co-editing (with Timothy Webb) The Prose of Percy Bysshe Shelley 1818-1822 for OUP.  This project was awarded an MHRA Research Associateship (holder Dr Paige Tovey) for 2010-11 and 2011-12.

Professor O’Neill has received the following awards for his poetry: an Eric Gregory Award in 1983 and a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors in 1990. He has successfully supervised research degrees on Shelley (Mary as well as Percy Bysshe), P. B. Shelley and Keats, Romantic Poetry and Wallace Stevens, Romantic Literature and Dream Poetry, Victorian Medievalism, Elegy in Douglas Dunn and Tony Harrison, The Great War and Irish Poetry, the writings of Olive Schreiner, Hart Crane's poetry, John Montague's poetry, a study of Yeats, Byron, and Shelley, the Decadent Image in 1890s poetry, the responses of Wordsworth and Coleridge to Shakespeare, Gary Snyder and Romanticism, narrative and identity in Keats's poetry, and voice and reception in Tennyson, Browning and other Victorian poets. He is happy to supervise postgraduates in any area of his research interests.

Research Groups

  • American Studies
  • Editing, Bibliography and History of the Book
  • Irish Studies
  • Romantic and Pre-Romantic Studies
  • Twentieth-Century Studies

Research Interests

  • Post-war British and American poetry
  • Romantic and post-Romantic poetry
  • Shelley
  • Editing

Selected Publications

Books: authored

Books: edited

Edited works: journals

Essays in edited volumes

Journal papers: academic

Show all publications