Dr. Michael Hinds

Born Omagh, Co.Tyrone 1968, Dr. Michael Hinds is an Associate Professor in the School of English at Dublin City University. He was 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. He was very fortunate when there to be mentored as a university teacher by the irrepressible John Devitt, just about the best close reader of a poem (and a film) that you can imagine. John was memorialized in the festschrift The Irish Reader: Essays for John Devitt, co-edited by Hinds, Margaret Kelleher and Peter Denman (Otior Press, 2006) and then through the John Devitt Poetry Seminar, which ran from 2005 through to 2016, when a speaker would be invited to speak about a poem of their own choice, and t explain why they chose it!

From 1996-9, he was a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Tokyo, and retains an interest in the literature and culture of Japan, as well as its representation elsewhere. He retains close connections to former colleagues (Professor Nobuaki Tochigi) and students (Professor Motochika Kusaka and Takahiro Kida) there, and has supervised the doctoral research of Thomas Caffrey on the novelist Haruki Murakami at DCU. While in Japan, Hinds struck up a close friendship with the Irish poet Ciaran Carson when he visited there as guest of the Japanese Association for Irish Literature, and they remained in touch until Carson's death in 2019. Aside from the obvious satisfactions of family life, probably the greatest thing that has ever happened to Hinds was to have a poem written about him by Carson, entitled "The Irish Exile Michael Hinds" and included in the volume The Twelfth of Never (1998), and he has revelled in the pleasure of being a minor character ever since.

His main research interests are 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 (Brill) with Stephen Matterson, his dcotoral supervisor and a key career influence. Hinds also contributed an essay to that volume on the poetry of Randall Jarrell, upon whom he had done his doctoral research at Trinity College Dublin, graduating in 2000.

He has contributed regularly to the Dublin Review of Books since 2010, reviewing poetry, books about poetry, and things unrelated entirely to poetry, including a review of a Book on the FBI's Obscenity Files. 

He has written increasingly about popular music and its literary applications in recent years, writing and delviering papers mostly about punk and post-punk (bands such as Sleaford Mods, Fucked Up and Full of Hell)  but also country and western ( a partial legacy of growing -up in the C&W mad North-West of Ireland). Thinking about that region led to his collaboration with Dr. Jonathan Silverman of the University of Massachusetts on a book about Johnny Cash fans worldwide, from Omagh to Okinawa, entitles Johnny Cash International: How and Why Fans Love the Man in Black which was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2020. It won the Peggy O'Brien Prize of 2023 for the best book in American Studies.

He also has an interest in the culture of horse racing, and has published internationally on that subject, and is pursuing a long term project on the unique culture of horse racing in France, which he hopes to complete before retirement. His regard for French culture, and how it has inspired and welcomed the work of writers from elsewhere, is another key fascination for him, and he has a proven track record of effective collaboration with French colleagues.

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. Another performed a comparative study of how folklore radicalizes the impact of 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 completed their work on Dermot Healy and pastoral. Another write upon how disco music provided a coded soundtrack for coming out in 1980s Ireland.Most recently, I had PhD students receive PhDs for the following array of titles: a thesis on the Japanese novelist (and translator of American Literature), Haruki Murakami; 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; and an amazing thesis on the representation of tourism in minor" noves by "major" artists set in Northern Italy. I currently supervise two doctoral students, one is pursuing a PhD by creative practice on memory, elegy and the poetics of space, the other is raising the question of what happens when we "genrefy" Mississippi Blues.

Shifting to the first person...As with anyone working in the discipline of English, undergraduate teaching is vital to me in terms of maintaining a sense of the state of the language and the arts that explore its possibilities. More than any other award, I was delighted to receive a Teaching Hero prize during the Covid lockdown, where the need for teaching as a remaining form of social adhesive became so painfully clear. In recent years, not least because of the peculiar challenges involved in thinking about the possibilities for our discipline in the face of how generative AI has sought to disidentify the reader and remove the sovereignity of human subjects over language, I have ended up speaking at events and communicating tothe media in favour of slow learning practices and moving away from a dependency upon digital technologies so that storytelling and orality should remain the key to an engaged classroom.

If you look through this profile, you will see a whole tangle of engagements, activities and outputs that comunicate my particular commitment to thinkling about things in ways that move between the disciplinary and the non-disciplinary. I have some skepticism about whether or not we can ever be truly "inter" disciplinary so have taken to avoiding the word, for all that I love it as an aspiration and quite often try to put it into practice!