Neilan began his career in creative writing before turning to academic scholarship, a path he has followed for over three decades alongside the vicissitudes of commercial architectural practice.

As an independent scholar, his work engages Foucauldian themes of knowledge, power, and the formation of the modern self, with particular attention to how a technologically mediated world shapes thought, memory, and conduct. Bringing together the philosophical, technical, and experiential, his fiction and non-fiction writing traces the historical conditions that have produced who we are, while opening onto who we might yet become.

His perspective is grounded in architectural theory, a discipline that treats buildings and cities as material sites where power and subjectivity are shaped. Trained to think across concepts, materials, abstract systems, and lived experience, Neilan applies this interdisciplinary lens to examine how contemporary infrastructures are reshaping human subjectivity.

He holds three first-class degrees, including a Master of Arts in Histories and Theories (with Distinction) from the AA in London, where his research explored transparency, governmentality, and modern subjectivity in Modernist architecture. As an undergraduate, he was his university's record prize winner, served as valedictorian, and received the institution's most prestigious award, the Hackett Scholarship for Overseas Study. He is also a recipient of multiple national and international prizes as a practitioner.

His debut book, After the Human, draws on Michel Foucault's archaeology of knowledge and genealogy of power to examine how contemporary AI systems are transforming the conditions of human subjectivity, arguing that machine-learning systems are not only intensifying these trajectories but inaugurating a qualitative shift in how subjectivity itself is structured.