Rory Patrick Feehan graduated with a PhD in English Language & Literature (Mode A) from Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, in 2018. His research focuses on the genesis of the Hunter Figure persona and the ensuing dialectic between the biographical and the aesthetic in the early writings of Hunter S. Thompson. Central to his research is the premise that Thompson’s persona not only directly led to the creation of the literary subgenre of Gonzo Journalism, but that it also helped to establish Thompson as both a leading SuperFictionist in contemporary American Literature and a modern-day icon of American Outlaw mythology.

Dr Feehan appeared as a panelist at Gonzofest in 2019 (the celebration of Hunter S. Thompson, held annually in Louisville, Kentucky), alongside Thompson’s former editor Margaret Harrell, U.S. National Lifetime Beat Poet Laureate Ron Whitehead, Juan Fitzgerald Thompson, and Professor William McKeen, author of Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson. He also spoke at the opening night of Gonzo: The Illustrated Guide to Hunter S. Thompson at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, in 2019.

He was also guest speaker at the official launch of the final novel by JP Donleavy, A Letter Marked Personal, in Dublin in November 2019, in which he spoke about the literary influence of Donleavy’s The Ginger Man on Hunter S. Thompson. As part of the Dublin Book Festival that same year, he gave a reading from A Letter Marked Personal and spoke again of the relationship between Donleavy and Thompson, as part of the JP Donleavy Speakeasy organized by Donleavy’s publisher Lilliput Press.

In 2020 he appeared as a guest speaker at the Las Vegas Book Festival on a panel with Margaret Harrell, Timothy Denevi (author of Freak Kingdom: Hunter S. Thompson’s Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American Fascism), and Juan Thompson (author of Stories I Tell Myself: Growing Up with Hunter S. Thompson), to discuss the legacy of Hunter S. Thompson.

Dr. Feehan most recently contributed an essay on Thompson to Margaret Harrell’s The Hell’s Angels Letters, alongside Pulitzer Prize-winner David Streitfeld, and also contributed a chapter on Thompson to the encyclopedia American Political Humor: Masters of Satire and Their Impact on U.S. Policy and Culture, which won the 2020 Outstanding Reference Source awarded by the RUSA and also won Best Reference of 2019 awarded by Library Journal.

He is currently writer-at-large for SPIN magazine and is working on a monograph entitled Totally Gonzo: The Early Writings of Hunter S. Thompson 1955-1970.