Exploring social and environmental justice, grieving, and mental illness through memoir and children’s literature.

During his thirty-six-year academic career, John O’Neal authored four books and edited three others on eighteenth-century French literature and thought.   Examining sensibility, the soul, and the notion of experience, his work focused on the ways we come to know what we know. Stanford French and Italian Studies, Penn State University Press, and University of Delaware Press brought out his books. The Voltaire Foundation at Oxford, the Modern Language Association, and the journal L’Esprit Créateur published his edited collections of essays.  He served two terms as president of the Northeast American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.  His research has been funded by a yearlong National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship and recognized by the French government, who promoted him from chevalier to officier to commandeur in the Napoleonic order of the French Academic Palms.

O’Neal has lived and worked all over the United States.  Born in Birmingham, Alabama, he attended high school in Tennessee, went to college in Virginia, pursued his M.A. in Vermont and France, and obtained his Ph.D. in California.  His first job landed him in northern Indiana, just a few miles from the Michigan border. From the Midwest he went on, four years later, to Upstate New York, where he spent the next thirty-two years teaching French language and literature at Hamilton College, finishing his career there in 2016.  He and his wife, Nancy, whom he met in graduate school in Vermont, then retired to La Jolla, California, where her parents had moved in 1970.  In retirement, he is enjoying not only the change of pace and weather, but also a chance to turn his attention to creative writing. Through memoir and children's literature, he hopes to use his past work on sensibility to explore, among others, the subjects of social and environmental justice, grieving, and mental illness, especially schizophrenia.