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Bruce O'Neill, Ph.D.

Coordinator, Urban Studies Minor
Professor

Education

Ph.D. in Anthropology, Stanford University

Research Interests

Bruce O’Neill is Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Saint Louis University. His research explores the cultural and spatial politics of cities, with an ethnographic focus on Bucharest, Romania.

Professor O’Neill is the author of Underground: Dreams and Degradations in Bucharest, Romania (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024), which was awarded the Anthony Leeds Book Prize in Urban Anthropology from the Critical Urban Anthropology Association and the William A. Douglass Book Prize in Europeanist Anthropology from the Society for the Anthropology of Europe. Underground brings into view processes of gentrification that drive urban development downward, into a newly renovated and expanded constellation of Metro stations, basements, and cellars.

O’Neill’s previous book, The Space of Boredom: Homelessness in the Slowing Global Order (Duke University Press, 2017), was awarded the 2019 Society for Romanian Studies Biennial Book Prize. The book takes a widely shared sense of boredom among Bucharest’s homeless population as a window into the felt realities of displacement from the global economy.

Moving forward, O’Neill is beginning a new book project, tentatively titled SuperLux: The Curation of an Elite Lifestyle, which will examine dynamics of wealth concentration in Bucharest’s affluent center‑north region. Taken together, these book projects explore the increasingly fragmented quality and character of urban life amid rising inequality.

Aspects of Professor O’Neill’s work have also appeared in a range of journals, including Cultural Anthropology (29:1), Public Culture (27:2), Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (28:1), Current Anthropology (64:1), and Ethnography (13:4). His research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Wenner‑Gren Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Fulbright‑Hays and Fulbright programs.

At Saint Louis University, Professor O’Neill teaches courses on social theory, ethnographic methods, and contemporary urbanism. He holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Stanford University and an M.Sc. in Cities, Space and Society from the London School of Economics.