Professor 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 has recently published, or has work forthcoming, on John Dos Passos, Lydia Davis and H.P. Lovecraft (though not together). He is currently writing a book on American culture 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).

In addition to his academic work and writing, Professor Collins is also a game designer (his first boardgame Slop Machines is forthcoming through Kickstarter in 2027).

Research interests and PhD supervision

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

Professor Collins has 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

Professor 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 philosophies of pedagogy and American music.

Selected publications

• 'An “Other-Century’s Decorum”: Lydia Davis, Anachronism, and the Ethics of Literary Form”, Lydia Davis: Critical Essays ed Tanner and Boorman (forthcoming, EUP, 2026)
• 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)
• “'Somewhat Unpleasant': 'May Day,' Literary Failure, and the Modernist Short Story as Crisis” Collins, M., The Bloomsbury Handbook to F. Scott Fitzgerald (Bloomsbury, 2025)