Dr Martin Dines
Contact
- Email: m.dines@kingston.ac.uk
- Location: Penrhyn Road
- Faculty: Kingston School of Art
- School: School of Creative and Cultural Industries
- Department: Department of Humanities
- ORCID
About
I am Associate Professor and Joint Head of the Department of Humanities.
I lecture in twentieth-century and contemporary British and American writing at undergraduate and postgraduate level.
My research focuses on British and American queer writing from the 1950s to the present, and on literary engagements with space and place. My latest book, The Literature of Suburban Change (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), explores how writers have innovated with a variety of literary forms in order to make sense of the growing complexity of the US suburbs. My most recent research examines literary responses to gentrification, mobility and infrastructure in 1960s and 1970s London.
I am chair of Kingston University's Race/Gender Matters research group.
Academic responsibilities
School Head of Department
Qualifications
- Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, Kingston University (2011)
- PhD English Literature, Kingston University (2006)
- MA English Literature (with distinction), University of Sussex (2001)
- BA hons English Studies and Philosophy, University of Nottingham (1997)
Gallery of work
'Surbiton Stories' app-based walking workshop
I devised this ‘walking workshop' for the level 4 English Literature module 'Reading London: Drama, Poetry, Prose'. It involved a walking tour of Surbiton augmented by multi-media material that I curated which students could access via a mobile phone app (see https://www.izi.travel/en/927f-surbiton-stories/en). The walking workshop was designed to foster a better appreciation of the relationship between works of literature and their settings. By affording my students the opportunity to read literary texts in situ, I enable what I call ‘parallel engagement': the simultaneous reading of place and text. In doing so, I'm attempting to facilitate a deeper understanding of – and to challenge some of the ideas students have about – familiar places and the stories we tell about them.
The Literature of Suburban Change
My most recent monograph was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2020. It examines recent writing that exploits a range of narrative forms – including the novel sequence, memoir, comics, and the short story cycle – to make sense of the complex spatiality of the US suburbs. I argue that these texts both depict and facilitate ‘suburban literacies', that is, a capacity to read and navigate environments that are both contested and ever-changing.
Speaking at 'The Coast is Queer', an LGBTQ+ literary festival held in Brighton, September 2019
This panel, titled 'Queering the Classroom: a roundtable on queer writing, (in)visibility and the curriculum', brought together myself, Dr Vedrana Velickovic (University of Brighton), Dr Sita Balani (King's College London) and Dr Samuel Solomon (University of Sussex). The speakers considered the specific challenges that come from bringing discussions of LGBTQ+ texts into mixed classes, as well as the occasional opportunities to teach predominantly queer groups of students. We discussed how we came to spend so much time with queer texts, and what motivates our students to join us. We asked: How do we talk to each other about sexuality in the context of our uneven power relationships? And what kinds of queer connections and world making are enabled and stifled by the university setting? The Coast is Queer festival was organized by New Writing South and the Marlborough Theatre.
The Literary London Society Annual Conference 2018
The most recent international conference I have organised was for the Literary London Society. The conference took the theme of 'Conflict and Resolution', with 2018 marking the centenary year of the end of the First World War and the start of female suffrage in the United Kingdom, and a half century since 1968, a year of social and political convulsions across the globe. Plenary talks included Prof Max Saunders (KCL), ‘London, the First World War, and the Future in the To-Day and To-Morrow Book Series'; panels examined themes from 'Mobilising bodies on the home front' to 'Conflict and cohabitation in multicultural London'.
‘"Is it a Queer Book?" Re-reading the 1950s Homosexual Novel'
My most recently published book chapter (2018) argues that the reformist and respectable British 'homosexual novel' of the 1950s needs to be re-read as a narrative that is shaped - or deformed - by the persistent presence of disreputable and pleasurable intimacies, locations and narrative modes; such a re-reading helps us to question simplistic progressivist histories of sexuality. The book in the above photograph, Martyn Goff's The Plaster Fabric (1957), is one of many novels I discuss; it was republished in 2014 by Valancourt Books with an introduction that I authored.
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