James O'Sullivan

In 2019 he published Towards a Digital Poetics: Electronic Literature & Literary Games (Palgrave Macmillan 2019). He has edited several academic volumes, including Reading Modernism with Machines (Palgrave Macmillan 2016).

His various uses of stylometry to analyse the work of James Patterson have garnered significant media attention, most notably being cited by Anthony Lane in The New Yorker. O'Sullivan has contributed to a number of digital resources, including Zebrapedia, a project seeking to transcribe the entirety of Philip K. Dick's Exegesis. He chaired the 2019 Electronic Literature Organization Conference & Media Arts Festival, the first time the annual gathering of new media scholars and practitioners was hosted in Ireland.

He contributed to The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature edited by Joseph Tabbi which received the 2018 N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism from the Electronic Literature Organization. He was shortlisted for the Fortier Prize for Digital Humanities research in 2014.

In 2018, O'Sullivan publicly criticised Irish universities for focusing too much on commercially oriented "skills" to the detriment of critical thinking. He has also claimed that many Irish academics are working class.

In early 2017, in an interview with Books Ireland magazine, O'Sullivan said that New Binary Press was operating at a loss, though he seemed confident of the press' future, claiming that "the value of dissonance outweighs that of cents". He has been vocal on the economic realities facing independent publishing houses, as well as an advocate of the role they play in the development of literary communities.

O'Sullivan's New Binary Press has published a number of works which explicitly express particular political sentiments. In 2017, the press published The Elysian: Creative Responses, an anthology of writings in response to Cork city's landmark Elysian building, a structure described as a "a symbol of the worst excesses of the Celtic Tiger". That same year, New Binary Press published John Barber's Remembering the Dead: Northern Ireland, which commemorates victims of The Troubles, and is based on a previous incarnation designed to raise awareness around gun violence in the US. In 2018, O'Sullivan's press published Autonomy, a project supporting Ireland's pro-choice movement. British writer Kit de Waal has associated New Binary Press with the publication of working class writers.

In 2016, O'Sullivan was placed third in the Gregory O'Donoghue International Poetry Prize. He has twice been shortlisted for the Fish Poetry Prize, as well as the Fish Short Story Prize. He received a High Commendation in Munster Literature Centre Fool for Poetry 2014 International Chapbook Competition and 2013 Charles Macklin Poetry Prize.

In 2016, O'Sullivan was vocal in his support for the beleaguered Cork Film Festival. He has been highly critical of the Catholic Church in Ireland.

O'Sullivan founded New Binary Press in 2012, a publishing house dedicated to the publication of both print and electronic literature. New Binary Press has published a number of well-known authors, including Nick Montfort and Karl Parkinson. The venture has had a lot of critical success: Graham Allen's The One That Got Away was shortlisted for the Shine/Strong Award 2015, while Unexplained Fevers by Jeannine Hall Gailey came second in the 2014 Science Fiction Poetry Association's Elgin Award. In 2018, novelling, a work of recombinant fiction by Will Luers, Hazel Smith, and Roger Dean that is published by New Binary Press, won the ELO's Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature, one of world's major prizes for screen-based literature. In 2016, one of the press' flagship works, Graham Allen's one-line-a-day digital poem, Holes, reached its 10-year anniversary. Irish literary scholar Kenneth Keating has argued that O'Sullivan's New Binary Press is one of the first publishers to cross "the division between online and print publishing in Irish poetry in a more progressive fashion", while Irish poet Matthew Geden has also praised the project: "...the press has published books by a number of new and interesting writers who are for one reason or another outside the current mainstream of Irish literature. Such projects are vital at a time when the poetry world here has been dominated by only a handful of presses and individuals. The emergence of new voices owes much to small publishers like New Binary and others...".

O'Sullivan's first collection of poetry, Kneeling on the Redwood Floor, was released by Lapwing Publications in 2011, a work which the author himself did not rate very highly. In 2014, Alba Publishing released his second collection, Groundwork, followed in 2017 by Courting Katie, published by Salmon Poetry. Reviewing Courting Katie, Dedalus poet Matthew Geden describes O'Sullivan as a "vibrant voice" that offers "timely reminders to look closer at the world around us". Writing in Poetry Ireland Review, Jessica Traynor likens O'Sullivan to a "latter-day Kavanagh" who "breathes life into deserted streets and grey city corners".

James Christopher O'Sullivan (born May 1986) is an Irish writer, publisher, editor, and academic from Cork city. He is most notable as the author and editor of several critical texts, the Founding Editor of New Binary Press, and the writer of three collections of poetry.