Academic biography

Born Omagh, Co.Tyrone 1968, DR. MICHAEL HINDS is an Associate Professor in the School of English at Dublin City University. He is the founder of the Irish Centre for Poetry Studies at the Mater Dei Institute, where he was Senior Lecturer and Head of English. He also started the journal POST: A Review of Poetry Studies while there.  From 1996-9, he was a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Tokyo, and retains an interest in the culture of Japan, as well as its representation elsewhere. His main interest is in American literature, however, and has published widely on it, with a particular emphasis on  American poetry and its intersection with popular culture. In 2006, he edited Rebound: The American Poetry Book (Rodopi) with Stephen Matterson. He has been a regular contributor to the Dublin Review of Books since 2010. He is currently working on an exploration of poetry's anguished relationship to money, unimaginatively entitled Moneypoetry. His collaboration with Dr. Jonathan Silverman  of the University of Massachusetts,   Johnny Cash International: How and Why Fans Love the Man in Black was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2020. He also has an interest in the culture of horse racing, and has published internationally on that subject.
His research students have worked  in both poetry studies and more interdisciplinary areas. One successful candidate received their PhD for their intervention in contemporary debates about literature and ecology adequate to the state of the ocean in the 21st century, another successfully defended their thesis on abstraction in contemporary poetics and Charles Altieri. A current student is performing a comparative study of how folklore radicalizes the impact or literature, looking at the work of African-American woman writers in conjunction with stories from the Assam Tea Plantation. Another recent PhD graduate wrote on Bob Dylan and the phenomenon of Late Style, and another recently completed their work on Dermot Healy and pastoral.  Other current PhD students are working on the following:  Japanese novelist (and translator of American Literature), Haruki Murakami; a PhD by creative practice on the poetics of space; another creative project on the lyric essay and liminality; a PhD thesis on the rise and fall and rise of woman's football and its representation in fiction and film; a comparative study of Patrick Kavanagh and the Bulgarian poet Dimcho Debelyanev.