Seán O'Neill

PhD thesis: ‘“Unruly Prosthetics:” Distributed Personhood and the Agency of Style in the Literary Feuds of Early Modern England’

How is participation in democratic life shaped by media technology, and how can new histories of reading help us to see beyond our contemporary media landscape? These are the questions my research will address through a comparative analysis of sixteenth and seventeenth century ‘social media.’ I will bring this analysis into dialogue with early modern and contemporary theories of ‘non-human agency,’ viewing literary style as a palpable object – or ‘unruly prosthetic’ – which ‘acts’ within the systems that produce and mediate society. This research will contribute to the history of reading and ideas by determining to what extent the behaviour of literary style, across a spectrum of early modern subcultures, shaped and subverted proto-democratic forms of reading and group identity.

Who or what inspired you to pursue your research interests?

I initially became interested in how media technology plays a role in the health of democracies due to the political developments of the early 2020s; online misinformation contributed to the deaths of thousands during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the rise of extreme political groups across western democracies.

After graduating from my M.Phil. course (on early modern satire) in 2022, I became a social worker and in 2025 completed a part-time M.Sc. on the impact of online misinformation on social work practice.

This experience inspired me to return to full time academia to pursue a longer-term, more systematic research project on the historical and theoretical underpinnings of media technology and civic life.