Ystafell 317 / Room 317,

Prif Adeilad y Celfyddydau / Main Arts Building,

Prifysgol Bangor / Bangor University,

LL57 2DG.

m.durrant@bangor.ac.uk

I currently teach on a broad range of modules at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, dealing with literatures from the Renaissance through to the contemporary period. Currently, I contribute to, or convene, the following modules:

Year 1

  • QXE1013 Reading, Thinking, Writing (Course convenor) 
  • QXE 1014 The Gothic in Literature/Film

Year 2

  • QXE2013 Renaissance and Reformation
  • OXE2003 Jonson to Johnson (Course convenor) 

Year 3

  • QXE3107 Sex, Sects and Scandal (Course convenor)
  • QXE3099 The English Dissertation

Postgraduate

MA

  • QXE4050 Material Texts and Editing (Course convenor) 
  • QXE4049 Adopt a Book (Course convenor)
  • QXE4015 Critical Theory and Practice

Ph.D. Supervision

I am especially interested in proposals related to early modern print culture and all aspects of the material text. I am also interested in projects related to devotion, religious sectarianism, and literary publishing in the early modern period.    

My research interests develop out of a longstanding interest in the contingencies of hand-press printing, developed in my Ph.D. project, and this part of my research contributes to debates about the ways in which material form can be read in dialogue with literary form. My first monograph (forthcoming with Manchester University Press) offers a bio-bibliographical history of a seventeenth century printer, publisher, and bookseller, and it engages with a range of literary genres, from spiritual self-writing, radical-religious polemic pamphlets, through to early biography, paying particular attention to their meaning-making potentials of materiality. Other recent publications continue to deal with, and develop, these issues, focusing, for example, on the role of paratexts, including printers’ devices, in the construction of trust in print products, as well as the literary significances of user-generated reworkings and acts of repair performed on early modern texts. More recently, I have began archive-based investigations into manuscript and printed fragments used to bind ecclesiastical court records in an English county records office. 

Recent Publications

-Balmer, A. and Durrant, M. ‘Shakespeare and Simmel on Lying and Love’, Cultural Sociology (2021), 1-18.

-Durrant, M. ‘Old Books, New Beginnings: Recovering Lost Pages’, Inscription: the Journal of the Material Text – Theory, Practice, History, 1 (2020), 50-63.

-Durrant, M. ‘“HERSCHEPT HER HERT”: Katherine Sutton’s Experiences (1663), the Printer’s Device and the Making of Devotion’, in People and Piety : Protestant devotional identities in early modern England, ed. Clarke, E. and Daniel, R. (Manchester : Manchester University Press, 2020), 26-43.

-Durrant, M. ‘Henry Hills and the Tailor’s Wife: Hypocrisy, Adultery, and the Archive’, in Forms of Hypocrisy in Early Modern England, ed. Nigri, L. (London: Palgrave, 2018), 138-56.

-Durrant, M. ‘“Unseen but very evidence”: Ghosts, Hauntings, and the Civil War Past’, in From Medievalism to Early Modernism: Adapting the English Past, ed. Norrie, A. & Gerzic, M. (London: Routledge, 2018), 244-60.

-Durrant, M. ‘“Who hears or reads of That, shall publish Thee”: Print, Transmission, and the King’s Book’, Scintilla: The Journal of the Henry Vaughan Association 21 (2018), 97-119.

 Forthcoming  

-Durrant, M. The Dreaded Name of Henry Hills: The Lives, Transformations, and Afterlives of a Seventeenth-Century Printer (under contract with Manchester: Manchester University Press).

Other publications 

-Durrant, M. 'Facts are not truth: Hilary Mantel goes on the record about historical fiction', The Conversation (June 2017), https://theconversation.com/facts-are-not-truth-hilary-mantel-goes-on-the-record-about-historical-fiction-79359 

-Durrant, M. 'Book of Common Prayer (1678)', Early Modern Female Book Ownership (May 2019), https://earlymodernfemalebookownership.wordpress.com/2019/05/28/book-of-common-prayer-1678/ 

I am willing to supervise a PhD

2023

2022

2021

  • PublishedSimmel and Shakespeare on Lying and Love
    Balmer, A. & Durrant, M., 1 Sep 2021, In: Cultural Sociology . 15, 3, p. 346-363 18 p.
    Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

2020

2019

2018

2017

Professional Nominations

Nominated for the ‘Dillwyn Medal for Early-Career Researchers in the Humanities and Creative Arts’, The Learned Society of Wales, 2021.

I joined the English Literature and Creative Writing Department at Bangor University in 2016, becoming a full-time lecturer in 2018, having previously served as a lecturer in Hong Kong and at Staffordshire University. I completed my Ph.D. on printing in the seventeenth century at the University of Manchester in 2015, which has a specific interest in the diverse and ambiguous representations of the figure of the printer in the early modern imagination. This research was interdisciplinary, bringing literary-critical frameworks into dialogue with bibliographical and book historical methodologies, and interdisciplinarity has continued to inform my modes of approach to early modern literary forms, to publishing histories, and to the significance of the early modern past in the contemporary moment.