Dr Michael Collins is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth Century American Literature and Culture, Department of English. After completing his Ph.D at The University of Nottingham with a thesis on the 19th Century U.S. Short Story and Theatre (monograph published 2016), Michael held a Leverhulme postdoc at Nottingham, working on the relationship between class politics and anthropology in 19th- and 20th- century US literature and culture. He then took a post as Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Kent, before coming to King’s in Sept. 2018. Most recently, Michael has been working on a cultural history of intelligence testing in the U.S. “Progressive Era” as part of an AHRC Early Career project entitled, “Literary Culture, Meritocracy and the Assessment of Intelligence, 1880- 1920”. He uses ritual and performance theory in the context of U.S. intellectual history, science, and literature to consider how texts “perform” and interact within a social world shaped by gesture and patterns of symbolic interaction along axes of race and class. Michael also researches and writes about radio and recorded sound, including podcasting, and supervises PhDs in this area.
Theatre and Performance Publications
Books
The Drama of the American Short Story, 1800 – 1865 (University of Michigan, 2016)
Class, Culture, and the Making of U.S. Modernism (under contract, EUP, 2021)
Articles
“The Illimitable Dominion of Charles Dickens: Transatlantic Print Culture and the Spring of 1842” (Open Library of Humanities. Vol. 2 No. 1, March 2016)
“At Home with the Weird – Dark Eco-Discourse in Tanis and Welcome to Night Vale” (http://www.revenantjournal.com/contents/at-home-with-the-weird-dark-eco-discourse-in-tanis-and-welcome-to-night-vale-danielle-barrios-oneill-falmouth-university-and-michael-collins-university-of-kent/#sthash.lIb4qqSH.dpbs)