My main areas of research and teaching are American literature, poetry, and experimental writing practices. I am Convenor of the 3rd year unit Reading and Writing Poetry, the 2nd year unit American Spaces, toegether with the MA Creative Writing unit, Reading Poetry. Other areas I tutor in include Approaches to Poetry, Modern and Contemporary American Writing and Researching Contemporary Cultures.
My main area of research explores different forms of writing that combine critical and creative practice. Much of my own practice in this area stems from scholarly research into modern and contemporary poetry and poetics; experimental writing in theory and practice; the relation between literature and philosophy (especially the work of Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, and Emmanuel Levinas); literature and the visual arts; Samuel Beckett; 20th century American literature.
My approach to learning and teaching is collaborative, questioning, and engaged. The French-Egyptian writer Edmond Jabès once commented that ‘we always start out from a written text and come back to the text to be written.’ In other words there always emerges on the page before us a blank spot where we see more than we are consciously aware. It is an experience of disassociation; vision without visual consciousness. For me, what’s important is how that blank spot is read.
Outside of work I run a small literary press called Like This Press which specialises in publishing handmade pamphlets and limited edition books-in-boxes. I used to want to be a tennis player. I still do. My wife describes me as dashing, debonair, and prone to hyperbole.
Literature does many things, not all of them clear or quantifiable. Most often, reading is a balance between glimpses and fades, connections and gaps, identifications and confusions. Frames of reference come and go. Passages we once thought we understood are suddenly incomprehensible again. Things change and life shifts. Literature, too, never sits still: it asks questions of the world, asks questions of us, challenges us to challenge ourselves. As the French writer, Maurice Blanchot, once wrote: the most profound question is the one we haven't asked yet.
Whatever you read or do, remember it’s ok to get lost; it’s difficult to discover things if we’re not prepared to lose ourselves sometimes.
In the words of Ferris Bueller, ‘Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.’
BA (Hons) English (Goldsmiths, University of London, 1999); MA Contemporary Approaches to English Studies (Goldsmiths, University of London, 2002); PhD in experimental writing and philosophy (Goldsmiths, University of London, 2005).
I joined MMU in 2007, having previously taught at Goldsmiths (2003-2006) and Royal Holloway (2006-7).
I am the Research Degrees Coordinator in the English Department.
Teaching Areas: American literature; poetry and poetics.
Convenor of American Poetics, American Spaces, Reading Poetry (MA Creative Writing)
Tutor on: Approaches to Poetry, American Spaces, American Writing: 19th Century to Modernism, Contemporary American Writing, Researching Contemporary Cultures (MA English Studies)
Director of Studies for one PhD completion on Don Delillo;
Currently part of supervisory team for 4 PhD theses on Finnegans Wake and Illustration (practice-led research); Writing and the Visual Arts; T.S. Eliot and the Poetics of Place; The Language of Touch in Contemporary Poetry.
My main area of research explores different forms of writing which combine critical and creative practice. Much of my own practice in this area stems from scholarly research into modern and contemporary poetry and poetics; experimental writing in theory and practice; literature and philosophy (especially Blanchot, Derrida, and Levinas; literature and the visual arts; Samuel Beckett; 20th century American literature.
A list of poetry publications is available at: https://mmu.academia.edu/NikolaiDuffy/Poetry
N. DUFFY (2016). Reading the Unreadable: Kenneth Goldsmith, Conceptual Writing and the Art of Boredom. Journal of American Studies. 50(3), pp.679-698.
NLG. Duffy (2016). Up the Creek. The Knives Forks and Spoons Press.
R. Waldrop (2016). The Selected Poems of Rosmarie Waldrop. NLG. Duffy. New Directions.
NLG. Duffy A Boat to Float on the Flood. Penned in the Margins.
N. Duffy A Hut on Ludshott Common. With agent.
LB. Adkins, N. Duffy, P. Buchler, DN. Cass, J. Hitchen (2018). Notes for a Performance Final Draft: 29 November 2017. LB. Adkins. Wild Pansy Press - Leeds University.
NLG. Duffy (2016). Up the Creek. The Knives Forks and Spoons Press.
R. Waldrop (2016). The Selected Poems of Rosmarie Waldrop. NLG. Duffy. New Directions.
NLG. Duffy A Boat to Float on the Flood. Penned in the Margins.
NLG. Duffy (2013). The Little Shed of Various Lamps. London: Very Small Kitchen.
NLG. Duffy (2013). Relative Strangeness: Reading Rosmarie Waldrop. Exeter: Shearsman.
N. DUFFY (2016). Reading the Unreadable: Kenneth Goldsmith, Conceptual Writing and the Art of Boredom. Journal of American Studies. 50(3), pp.679-698.
NLG. Duffy (2012). Rosmarie Waldrop and Theories of Translation. 452ºF: Journal of Theory of Literature and Comparative Literature. 7, pp.24-39.
N. Duffy (2012). American inheritance: Steve Erickson and the pursuit of happiness. European Journal of American Culture. 31(1), pp.41-53.
N. Duffy (2010). Among Other Things; or, Sculpture Beyond Identity. MOSAIC-A JOURNAL FOR THE INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDY OF LITERATURE. 43(2), pp.1-18.
NLG. Duffy (2007). The Poetics of Emergency. Jacket2. 32,
NLG. Duffy (2016). Deconstruction. In: The Edinburgh Companion to Critical Theory. Edinburgh University Press,
NLG. Duffy (2016). Postmodern Aesthetics. In: The Edinburgh Companion to Critical Theory.
N. Duffy Without location: circumlocutions of the neuter in Rosmarie Waldrop.
L. Adkins, N. Duffy, K. Aubrey, A. Kettle, L. Biggs, et al. C. Williams, S. Bonnell, N. Royle, E. Bryne, J. McCullagh, D. Cooper, L. Raven, S. Dixon, B. Schoene, P. Evans, . et al. Made in Translation.
'Somewhere in the Atlantic: Rosmarie Waldrop and the Poetics of the Between,' BAAS 2013, Exeter University, 18-21 April 2013.
'The Poetics of Collage: On Rosmarie Waldrop,' Contemporary Poetry and Source, Plymouth University, 18-20 May 2012.
'Extending the Document: Craig Santos Perez’s from unincorporated territory,' American Alternatives/Alternative Americas, University College Cork 27-28 April 2012.
'An Alternate Way of Doing Things: Burning Deck and Small Press Publishing,' Writing and the Small Press, University of Salford, 31 March 2012.
‘Samuel Beckett: Physics, Poetics and Late Modernism,’ Samuel Beckett: Out of the Archive, York University, 22-26 June 2011.
‘It doesn’t take long to count a handful of coins: Notes on the Economics of Poetry,’ Department of English Research Seminars, Huddersfield University, 23 March, 2011.
‘American Revolutions or the Politics of Crowds’, BAAS, Edinburgh University, 27-30 March 2008.
‘States of Damage and States of Exception’, ’States of Damage’, Warwick University, 8 March 2008.
‘Reading the Unreadable: On Kenneth Goldsmith’, ‘TALKS’, Contemporary Poetics Research Centre, Birkbeck, 22 November 2006.
‘On Being Ghostly: Michael Palmer and the Poetics of the Ghostly’, American Studies Research Seminar Series, Sussex University, 7 November 2006.
‘The Anonymous Company of Samuel Beckett,’ Beckett and Company, Tate Modern, London Consortium, Birkbeck, Goldsmiths, 6-8 October 2006.
‘Poetics of Emergency or, The Aesthetics and Politics of Experimentation’, Pressure to Experiment, University of Southampton, 28-29 September 2006.
‘Nothing to Say and Saying It: Rosmarie Waldrop and 9/11’, American Prohibitions, Irish Association of American Studies, 31 March-1 April 2006.
‘A.N. Other Language: Rosmarie Waldrop and the Matter of the Page,’ ‘TALKS’, Contemporary Poetics Research Centre, Birkbeck, 1 March 2006.
‘Circumlocutions of the Neuter: Fragmentation and Gender in Rosmarie Waldrop’, Another Language: Contemporary US-American Poetic Experiment in a Changing World, Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum, 7-9 July 2005.
‘The Curious Goings-On of the Night: Writing Maurice Blanchot Writing’, Blanchot, The Obscure, Monash University, 19-20 August 2004.
‘The Memory of Tomorrow: Derrida and the Invention of Democracy’, Encounters with Derrida, University of Sussex, 22-23 September 2003.
Co-organiser of BCLA Graduate Conference, 'Boundaries', Goldsmiths, 6 January 2005.
Assistant, 'Beckett and Company,' Goldsmiths and Tate Modern, 6-8 October 2006.
I have peer-reviewed articles for diacriticsi and US Studies Online.
Founders Research Travel Award, British Association of American Studies, 2011
Member of British Association of American Studies, and the Poetry Society