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About
Dr Rachel O’Neill is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE.
Dr O’Neill is a feminist media and cultural studies scholar specialising in gender and sexuality. Her research centers questions of subjectivity and inequality, primarily in the contemporary UK context but with attention to transnational circulations of culture and capital. She is the author of Seduction: Men, Masculinity and Mediated Intimacy, published by Polity in 2018. Her work has appeared in journals including Feminist Theory, Television and New Media, and European Journal of Cultural Studies.
Prior to joining the Department, Dr O’Neill was a Research Fellow in Sociology at the University of Warwick. She received her PhD in Gender and Cultural Studies from King’s College London.
Expertise
gender and sexuality; media and cultural studies; ethnography; qualitative methods; feminist theory
Research
Dr O’Neill’s first monograph, Seduction: Men, Masculinity and Mediated Intimacy, was published by Polity in 2018. Seduction is the first book-length study of the transnational cultural formation known as the ‘seduction community’, which offers instruction and advice to heterosexual men on the management of their intimate lives. This project pushes forward new theoretical horizons in examining how intimacy today is lived and experienced, as those most private and personal aspects of our lives are increasingly played out in relation to and through relationship with media texts and technologies.
Seduction was named Times Higher Education Book of the Week on publication and was shortlisted for the 2019 British Sociological Association (BSA) Philip Abrams Memorial Prize. An earlier article based on this research won the BSA SAGE Prize for Innovation and Excellence in 2016. Seduction has been reviewed in numerous academic journals, including European Journal of Women's Studies, Feminism & Psychology, Gender, Work & Organisation, Journal of Gender Studies and Men & Masculinities. It has also attracted widespread media coverage both nationally and internationally, with features in publications such as The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Guardian, The Quietus, Buzzfeed News, Vice: Broadly and Newsweek. In 2019, Dr O’Neill contributed to a documentary about the seduction industry for Panorama, BBC One’s flagship current affairs programme. In 2026, Seduction was translated into simplified Chinese under the title: 亲密陷阱: 伦敦PUA社群产业研究 (Intimacy Trap: Research on the PUA community and industry in London). The publication of generated a great deal of media and cultural commentary in China, with interviews and reviews featuring in outlets including Shanghai Review of Books, Southern People Weekly, Beijing News, and NYLON. Intimacy Trap was listed by Beijing News as one of its books of the year for 2026.
In 2019, Dr O’Neill was awarded a Wellcome Trust Fellowship in Humanities and Social Sciences for a project examining the emergence of ‘wellness’ as a novel cultural formation and new commercial development in the UK, one that is intimately bound up with the aspirational economies of social media. Exploring both the glamorous trappings of wellness media and the more mundane entanglements these generate in women’s everyday lives, this research examines how the rise of wellness coincides – temporally but also ideologically – with the decline of welfare. It situates the consumption of wellness practices and products in Britain within a global context, tracing the orientalising tropes, racialised hierarchies and extractive relationships that pattern this movement-market. It further explores the connections between wellness culture and conventional medicine, including through the rise of Instagram doctors. Dr O’Neill has published a number of articles from this research in journals including European Journal of Cultural Studies, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Television and New Media, and The Sociological Review. This research also provides the basis for Dr O’Neill’s second monograph, under contract with Polity and provisionally titled Pursuing Wellness: Feminism, Food, and the Vexed Politics of Self-Care.
Dr O’Neill is currently at work with department colleague Dr Simidele Dosekun on a joint project concerning what they term ‘popular financial feminisms’, wherein financial education is framed as a feminist imperative across a range of cultural fora. Their first article on this topic was published in Signs in 2026.
Teaching
Doctoral supervision
Dr O'Neill welcomes applications from prospective doctoral researchers relating to her areas of research, and is especially interested in projects that approach questions of health through feminist and cultural studies’ frameworks.