Dr Collins is the author of Exoteric Modernisms: Progressive Era Realism and the Aesthetics of Everyday Life (EUP 2023), The Drama of the American Short Story, 1800 - 1865 (Michigan 2016), and editor (with Gavin Jones) of The Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story (CUP, 2023). He is the Chair of the British Association for American Studies and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is currently writing a book on American Literature and the Civil Service.

He was the co-I on an AHRC grant entitled "Literature, Meritocracy and the Assessment of Intelligence, 1880 - 1920" with Dr Sara Lyons (Kent)

Research interests and PhD supervision

• American Studies
• American Literature
• The Short Story
• Realism and Modernism
• Literature, Meritocracy and Intelligence

I have supervised many PhD projects topics ranging from American popular music and folklore, "postpostmodernism", comparative U.S. and Argentinian naturalism, the Harlem Renaissance, crime fiction, and contemporary American film.

Teaching

Dr Collins teaches a wide range of courses in the field of American literature and culture from the period of European settlement through to the 21st century. He is particularly engaged with of questions of class, race, ethnicity in U.S. history and is a specialist on the American short story. He has also written on theories of pedagogy and American music.

Selected publications

• Co-Editor w. Gavin Jones - The Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story (CUP, May 2023)
• Exoteric Modernisms: Progressive Era Literature and the Aesthetics of Everyday Life (Edinburgh University Press, September, 2023)
• The Drama of the American Short Story, 1800 – 1865 (University of Michigan, October 2016)
• No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger: Mark Twain’s Critique of Progressive era Meritocracy (Textual Practice, Sept 2021)
• Afropessimism, Liminal Hotspots and Claude McKay’s Aesthetic of Sovereign Rejection in Romance in Marseille (English Language Notes, September 2020)