Before coming to Penn, Damien Keane was educated at Vassar College and Queens University, Belfast.

His dissertation, against the backdrop of state formation in Ireland, advances in media technology, and the rise of fascism in the 30s, deals with questions about the ability of language to represent a particular group to itself and to others.

Other areas of interest include the twentieth-century Irish studies more generally, with a special interest in political and literary culture in Northern Ireland; the idea of "coming after" in fiction and non-fiction; the city in literature; critical theory; and cultural studies of music, especially jazz and punk.

He was also co-coordinator of the Penn Modernism and Twentieth Century Reading Group.