Caylum O’Neill

Caylum O’Neill is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research focusses on contemporary literature written in English and German that foregrounds queer, migrant and working-class positionalities. His recent publications include ‘Weder Fisch noch Fleisch: Tracing the Joycean in Terézia Mora’s Alle Tage’ in the comparative literary journal Angermion and ‘Familial Trauma and Queer Sexual Catharsis in Neel Mukherjee’s A Life Apart’ in the edited volume Queer Trauma Across Borders.

O’Neill received his PhD in English and German literature from University College Dublin in 2026 for a thesis analysing cultural depictions of queer migration in Berlin and London in contemporary English- and German-language works. His doctoral and postdoctoral research were part of the ERC-funded project VICTEUR: European Migrants in the British Imagination. He has taught courses in English and German literature at undergraduate and postgraduate level at University College Dublin and University of Limerick.

This project views reduced forms of relationality as a strategy of resistance against marginalization, focussing on contemporary queer literature written in English and German. Through an understanding of reduction not as a lessening, but as a distilling or refining, the project explores queer modes of relationality to analyse how these might be reduced to an improved form that works to ameliorate, to resist and to ultimately undo.

These forms encompass kinship models that eschew the normative in favour of bonds divorced from the familial or the juridical, as well as fleeting sexual encounters which are reduced in their burden of responsibility but not their intensity. Working with an intercultural corpus of texts, this project analyses queer narratives that engage with other forms of marginal identity, to chart a course towards resistance of marginalization that is predicated upon reduced forms of relationality.