Professor Daniel McNeil is an award-winning author, editor, and mentor who explores how movement, travel, and relocation have impacted creative development, the writing of cultural history, and the assessment of political choices.

Over the past two decades, Professor McNeil has led interdisciplinary teaching and program development across various institutions in Europe and North America as a lecturer in Black and Minority Studies at the University of Hull, a lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Newcastle University, and Carleton University’s strategic hire in Migration and Diaspora Studies. His fellowships and visiting positions include the Ida B. Wells-Barnett Visiting Professorship of African and Black Diaspora Studies at DePaul University – a position designed to support intellectuals with a proven track record of research excellence – and the Visiting Public Humanities Faculty Fellowship at the University of Toronto – a position open to citizens of all countries who are tenured faculty members with a history of research achievement, the capacity to present their research across disciplinary and institutional boundaries, and a promise of continued excellence.  In 2021, he was appointed the Queen’s National Scholar Chair in Black Studies at Queen’s University in recognition of his demonstrated excellence in cultivating innovative, collaborative, and interdisciplinary research programs as well as rich and rewarding learning experiences for students to study and engage the connections between the arts, social justice, and decolonial thought. 

Professor McNeil’s interdisciplinary scholarship has transformed and boosted several fields, including Black Studies, Cultural Studies, History, Migration and Diaspora Studies, and Multiculturalism Studies. His publications include Migration and Stereotypes in Performance and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), which engages with Stuart Hall’s analysis of stereotypes that tend to reduce groups to a limited set of characteristics, fix these characteristics as essential and natural traits, and occur when there are gross inequalities of power. This collection, which McNeil co-edited with Yana Meerzon and David Dean, received an Honourable Mention for the 2022 Patrick O’Neill Award from the Canadian Association for Theatre Research (CATR). In the citation for the award, McNeil and his co-editors were commended as skilled leaders of their crafts who had developed a “brilliant” and “provocative” contribution to support critical inquiry and public-facing research in fields such as Theatre and Performance Studies, Cultural and Migration Studies, and Applied Theatre and History. 

Professor McNeil’s most recent book, Thinking While Black: Translating the Politics and Popular Culture of a Rebel Generation (Rutgers University Press, 2023), delves into the personal and social connections with music, film, and culture that have inspired multiracial groups to envision and establish social movements aimed at dismantling racial inequalities. Reviews have described the book as an “important,” “nuanced,” “deeply informed,” “lucid,” “smart,” and “wonderfully novel” analysis of the aspirations and achievements of Black Atlantic communities in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  When shortlisted for the Next Generation Book Award, the most extensive international awards program for independent authors and publishers, the book was cited as a meticulous and inspiring account of intellectual work within and beyond formal academic, media, and political contexts.

Professor McNeil’s work also encompasses non-traditional academic publishing; he imaginatively brings humanities research into the public sphere for debate, discussion and examination in cultural criticism, public lectures, feature articles, and contributions to documentary films in collaboration with institutions such as Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, the Canadian Museum of Human Rights, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto. Since 2022, he has produced and co-hosted the Black Studies Podcast, which assembles artists, activists, curators, scholars and musicians to discuss creative and collaborative knowledge-making, building and sharing, and was shortlisted as an outstanding education series in the 2023 Canadian Podcast Awards.  

In recognition of his impactful scholarship, teaching, and academic citizenship within and beyond the university, Professor McNeil received the 2025 Stuart Hall Award for Outstanding Mentorship.  This award is one of a long list of acknowledgements of his scholarship, mentorship, teaching, and community work, including the inaugural Editor’s Award from the Canadian Journal of Communication, two Research Achievement Awards from Carleton University, and two Black Excellence in Mentorship Awards from Queen’s University.   As noted in the citation for the Stuart Hall Outstanding Mentorship Award, Professor McNeil is a scholar who, like Stuart Hall, brings communities working on Black Atlantic Cultural Studies to the forefront of contemporary debates not only in Europe and North America but also in the Caribbean and much of the Global South.   He seeks out others’ strengths and does what he can to facilitate their flourishing.