Rate My Professor Neil Vallelly

Dr. Neil Vallelly is a Senior Lecturer in the Sociology, Gender Studies and Criminology Programme at the University of Otago. He holds a BA and MA from Queen's University Belfast and a PhD from the University of Otago, completed in 2015 with the thesis "Being-in-Light at the Early Modern and Reconstructed Theatres." His career includes roles as a PhD researcher and adjunct teaching fellow in the Department of English and Linguistics at Otago prior to his current position. In 2022, he received a two-year Rutherford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship for research on neoliberalism and migrant incarceration in Aotearoa New Zealand and beyond.

Vallelly's academic interests encompass critical and social theory, political sociology, border and migration studies, and neoliberalism. He authored Futilitarianism: Neoliberalism and the Production of Uselessness (Goldsmiths Press, 2021), with translations into Italian (Vite Rubate, 2022) and Portuguese (forthcoming). He co-authored Edges of Empire: The Politics of Immigration in Aotearoa New Zealand, 1980-2020 (2025) with Francis L. Collins and Alan Gamlen. Key articles include "Border-as-Flesh: Towards a Theory of Border Reversibility" (Theory & Event, 2025), "Who Cares for Wellbeing? Corporate Wellness, Social Reproduction and the Essential Worker" (2023), and "Visible and Invisible Work in the Pandemic: Social Reproduction and the Ambivalent Category of the Essential Worker" (2023). Vallelly co-edits the journal Counterfutures, serves on the Executive Committee of the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy, and contributes as a researcher for Economic and Social Research Aotearoa. His scholarship appears in journals like Angelaki, Organization, and Rethinking Marxism, with media engagements in Jacobin, New Internationalist, BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed, and others. He coordinates SOCI 306: Public Sociology and teaches SOCI 101 and SOCI 103, while supervising postgraduates in neoliberalism, critical theory, borders, migration, social reproduction, and abolition.