Literature in the Irish language during the late modern age from the Williamite Wars of the 1690s to the Great Famine of the mid-1800s is among Neil Buttimer's core research interests.  The language was still widely spoken and written in Ireland, and overseas, throughout those years. Records for it offer insights into the distinctive experiences, world view, and means of communicating, of those who used Irish then in their daily lives. Finding and describing original Gaelic sources for the period form part of his studies.  Publications arising from work of that kind over many decades include his Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts in the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1989), and Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts in Houghton Library, Harvard University (2022).  Buttimer collaborates with scholars from other fields in attempts to bring wider perspectives to bear on interpreting Irish-language evidence, at local and national levels. That activity is reflected in his role as associate editor of Cork History and Society: Interdisciplinary Essays on the History of an Irish County (1993). 

He is a former Hon. Editor of The Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society (2000–2003).  Published articles of his include enquiries into awareness among speakers of Irish of international events, their interaction with urban environments, or engagement with other areas of contemporary existence. Examining how the activities of Daniel O'Connell (1775–1847) were reflected by Gaelic data produced in the Liberator's own era forms part of that same broadly based investigation.  He explores all such material by means of close textual analysis of the relevant information (https://portraidi.ie/en/neil-buttimer/).  Buttimer lectured on issues of this variety during his forty-year teaching career at the Department of Modern Irish at University College, Cork (UCC), from which he retired in 2021. He is a graduate of UCC (1975 and 1977), and of Harvard University (1983), where he completed his doctoral dissertation on a topic in early Irish literature, having spent an intervening twelve months as Research Scholar at the School of Celtic Studies, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.