Michael O'Sullivan has quickly become a major voice in the defense of enlightened approaches to teaching. Cloneliness is a clear-sighted and wide-ranging response to contemporary forms of connected isolation. What is particularly inspiring about O'Sullivan's approach is the manner in which he links his analysis so profoundly to the needs of his students, and does so in truly global contexts.

Graham Allen, Professor of English, University College Cork, Ireland

With his astute, even shimmering, cross-articulations of 'cloneliness,' Michael O'Sullivan is rapidly positioning himself among the forefront of affect theorists for our (post)digital age. In O'Sullivan's timely rendering, the telegram-like beat of his scholarly approach--'radical embodied cognitive loneliness'--assumes the contemporary guise of eerily penetrating fiberoptic pulses. 'Cloneliness' serves dark and unseen masters, as our desires to connect become thwarted by the pixelated trap of a market-driven, online existence. The antidote to such despair? The hard-fought perspicacity of O'Sullivan's driving intellect, which bids us--every last one of us facing the monitor's false dawn--to resist.

Stuart Christie, Professor of English Language and Literature, Hong Kong Baptist University, China

Through wide-ranging exploration of the theme of loneliness in neuroscience, informatics, biopolitics, education, arts, and popular culture, and by bringing in various texts of philosophy, religion, sociology, and literature from the East and West over different periods, Michael O'Sullivan demonstrates in Cloneliness: On the Reproduction of Loneliness how the concept of loneliness has changed, how people have struggled with the fatal condition as human beings, and how in a similar vein people nowadays are urged to be lonely and forced to inwardly connect with each other in an algorithmically controlled environment of education, career, and everyday life rooted in cyberspace. Cloneliness makes a significant contribution to the humanities in a digital global society, especially with its critique of education today.

Akiyoshi Suzuki, Professor of American and Comparative Literature and East-West Studies, Nagasaki University, Japan