Staff profile

I came to Durham in 2018, having previously taught at Newcastle and Teesside.

My main interest is in Victorian poetry and poetics. A major focus in my research to date has been the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Poetry of Religious Experience appeared in 2017 (paperback 2019). The book contests established views of Hopkins’s poetry as a unified project by exploring the shifting way in which he imagines religious belief in individual history. I am now editing Gerard Manley Hopkins in Context for Cambridge University Press.

In addition to continued work on Hopkins, I am also engaged in two other projects:

1. Nonsense: my work in this area seeks to open up new ways of interpreting Victorian nonsense by expanding our idea of its forms and contexts. Recent publications here include an essay on Edward Lear and the colonial dimensions of Victorian nonsense for Victorian Studies, and a chapter for The Edinburgh Companion to Nonsense. 

2. Vernacular and dialect poetics. Current work in this area includes an essay on voice and print in dialect poetry.

I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and serve on the editorial board of the journal Hopkins Quarterly.

I would be happy to be approached by potential research students in any of my areas of interest.

Office hours, 2022-23: Tuesdays 1-2 (email for link)

• Victorian poetry and poetics
• Gerard Manley Hopkins
• Nonsense
• Vernacular/dialect writing
• Literature and religion
• Lyric theory and poetic genre

Authored book

• Dubois, Martin (2017). Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Poetry of Religious Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Book review

• Dubois, Martin (2022). Lesa Scholl, Hunger, Poetry and the Oxford Movement. Modern Language Review 117(4): 708-709.
• Dubois, Martin (2021). The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women's Poetry, ed. Linda K. Hughes. Tennyson Research Bulletin 11(5): 463-465.
• Dubois, Martin (2020). Sara Lodge, Inventing Edward Lear. Nineteenth-Century Literature 75: 123-126.
• Dubois, Martin (2017). The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins: Volume III: Diaries, Journals, and Notebooks, ed. Lesley Higgins. Modern Language Review 112(2).
• Dubois, Martin (2017). Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry, ed. James Williams and Matthew Bevis. Review of English Studies 68(287).
• Dubois, Martin (2015). The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins: Volume VII: The Dublin Notebook, ed. Lesley J. Higgins and Michael F. Suarez, S.J. Hopkins Quarterly 42(1-2).

Chapter in book

• Dubois, Martin (Forthcoming). Experimental Medievalism: The Defence of Guenevere and other Poems (1858). In The Cambridge Companion to William Morris. Waithe, Marcus. Cambridge University Press.
• Dubois, Martin (2021). Victorian Nonsense and Its Kinships. In The Edinburgh Companion to Nonsense. Barton, Anna & Williams, James. Edinburgh University Press. 81-97.
• Dubois, Martin (2016). Forms. In Nineteenth-Century Poetry: Criticism and Debates. Herapath, Jonathan & Mason, Emma. Routledge.
• Dubois, Martin (2015). Private voices: diary journals, correspondence, autobiography. In The Cambridge Companion to John Ruskin. O'Gorman, Francis. Cambridge University Press.
• Dubois, Martin (2013). Hopkins's Beauty. In The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry. Bevis, Matthew. Oxford University Press.

Journal Article

• Dubois, Martin (Accepted). Dialect, Victorian Poetry, and the Voices of Print. ELH: English Literary History
• Dubois, Martin (2018). Edward Lear's India and the Colonial Production of Nonsense. Victorian Studies 61(1): 35-59.
• Dubois, Martin (2015). Sermon and Story in George MacDonald. Victorian Literature and Culture 43(3): 577-587.
• Dubois, Martin (2013). Hopkins and the Burden of Security. Essays in Criticism 63(4).
• Dubois, Martin (2012). William Barnes's Economy. Cambridge Quarterly 41(3).
• Dubois, Martin (2012). Styles of Translation: Hopkins' Bibles. Victorian Poetry 50(3).
• Dubois, Martin (2011). Diverse Strains: Music and Religion in Dickens’s Edwin Drood. Journal of Victorian Culture 16(3).
• Dubois, Martin (2010). The Month as Hopkins Knew It. Victorian Periodicals Review 43(3).