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. An edited collection, Gerard Manley Hopkins in Context, was published in 2025.

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. 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. Recent work in this area includes an essay on voice and print in dialect poetry for ELH.

I have undertaken a number of roles in the department at Durham, including Chair of the MA Board of Examiners and Co-Director of Postgraduate Studies. I am currently Director of the Centre for Poetry and Poetics. Away from Durham, I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and serve on the editorial board of the journal Hopkins Quarterly.

I have supervised or co-supervised three PhDs to successful completion and examined a further six PhDs. I would be happy to be approached by potential research students in any of my areas of interest.

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

Authored book

• Dubois, M. (2017). Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Poetry of Religious Experience. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316848036

Book review

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

Chapter in book

• Dubois, M. (2025). Northern England. In M. Dubois (Ed.), Gerard Manley Hopkins in Context (32-39). Cambridge University Press
• Dubois, M. (2024). Experimental Medievalism: The Defence of Guenevere and other Poems (1858). In M. Waithe (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to William Morris (73-84). Cambridge University Press
• Dubois, M. (2021). Victorian Nonsense and Its Kinships. In A. Barton, & J. Williams (Eds.), The Edinburgh Companion to Nonsense (81-97). Edinburgh University Press
• Dubois, M. (2016). Forms. In J. Herapath, & E. Mason (Eds.), Nineteenth-Century Poetry: Criticism and Debates. Routledge
• Dubois, M. (2015). Private voices: diary journals, correspondence, autobiography. In F. O'Gorman (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to John Ruskin. Cambridge University Press
• Dubois, M. (2013). Hopkins's Beauty. In M. Bevis (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry. Oxford University Press

Edited book

• Dubois, M. (Ed.). (2025). Gerard Manley Hopkins in Context. Cambridge University Press

Journal Article

• Dubois, M. (2023). Dialect, Victorian Poetry, and the Voices of Print. ELH: English Literary History, 90(4), 1069-1098. https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2023.a914016
• Dubois, M. (2018). Edward Lear's India and the Colonial Production of Nonsense. Victorian studies, 61(1), 35-59. https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.61.1.02
• Dubois, M. (2015). Sermon and Story in George MacDonald. Victorian Literature and Culture, 43(3), 577-587. https://doi.org/10.1017/s106015031500008x
• Dubois, M. (2013). Hopkins and the Burden of Security. Essays in Criticism, 63(4),
• Dubois, M. (2012). William Barnes's Economy. The Cambridge Quarterly, 41(3),
• Dubois, M. (2012). Styles of Translation: Hopkins' Bibles. Victorian poetry, 50(3),
• Dubois, M. (2011). Diverse Strains: Music and Religion in Dickens’s Edwin Drood. Journal of Victorian Culture, 16(3),
• Dubois, M. (2010). The Month as Hopkins Knew It. Victorian Periodicals Review, 43(3),