Professor Matthew Rubery, BA (Texas) PhD (Harvard)

Profile

My work focuses on modern literature, media history, and styles of reading. Originally from Texas, I joined Queen Mary in 2010 after teaching in Leeds and Philadelphia for a number of years and completing my doctorate at Harvard. My books include The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction after the Invention of the News (Oxford, 2009), The Untold Story of the Talking Book (Harvard University Press, 2016), Reader’s Block: A History of Reading Differences (Stanford, 2022), and Undercover: Victorian Investigative Journalism in Fact and Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2024). Other books that I have edited or co-edited include Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies (Routledge, 2011), Secret Commissions: An Anthology of Victorian Investigative Journalism (Broadview, 2012), and Further Reading (Oxford, 2020).

Research

Research Interests:

• Victorian Fiction
• Media History and History of the Book
• Audiobooks and Sound Studies
• Disability Studies
• Styles of Reading

Recent and On-Going Research

My research interests include modern literature, media history, and styles of reading. My work on Victorian literature began with The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction after the Invention of the News (Oxford University Press, 2009), which was awarded the European Society for the Study of English Book Award for Junior Scholars. Secret Commissions: An Anthology of Victorian Investigative Journalism (Broadview, 2012) documents how unsparing descriptions of poverty and social injustice became a regular feature of English journalism. Guardian journalist Nick Davies described it as ‘a book full of amazing stuff—Victorian in its facts, but contemporary in its themes’. My latest book is titled Undercover: Victorian Investigative Journalism in Fact and Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2025).

Another strand of my research explores the relationship between literature and new media. Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies (Routledge, 2011) was the first essay collection to address the significance of recorded literature by authors ranging from Charles Dickens to Toni Morrison and Barack Obama. My history of the audiobook titled The Untold Story of the Talking Book (Harvard University Press, 2016) received a Certificate of Merit in the 2017 Association for Recorded Sound Collections Award for Excellence.

My books on reading include Further Reading (Oxford, 2020), a collection of more than thirty essays on the status of reading in the twenty-first century, and Reader’s Block: A History of Reading Differences (Stanford, 2022), the first history of neurodivergent reading.

My research has been generously supported by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Arts & Humanities Research Council, British Academy, Leverhulme Trust, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Humanities Center, Swedish Research Council, and Wellcome Trust.

Publications

Books:

Undercover: Victorian Investigative Journalism in Fact and Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2025)

Reader’s Block: A History of Reading Differences (Stanford University Press, 2022) 

Further Reading, ed. Matthew Rubery and Leah Price (Oxford University Press, 2020)

The Untold Story of the Talking Book (Harvard University Press, 2016)

The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction after the Invention of the News (Oxford University Press, 2009)

Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies, ed. Matthew Rubery (Routledge, 2011)

Secret Commissions: An Anthology of Victorian Investigative Journalism, ed. Stephen Donovan and Matthew Rubery (Broadview, 2012)

Journal Articles:

‘Projected Books for Disabled Veterans and Civilians after World War II’, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 118.4 (December 2024)

‘Amateur Lunatics: Investigative Journalism, Asylum Reform, and the Undercover Authorship of Lewis Wingfield’ (with Stephen Donovan), Victorian Literature and Culture 50.4 (2022): 721-755.

‘Emigration with a Vengeance: Undercover Investigative Journalism and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Amateur Emigrant’ (with Stephen Donovan), Victorian Periodicals Review 54.4 (2021): 527-563.

‘Doing the Amateur Casual: Victorian Investigative Journalism and the Legacy of James Greenwood’s “A Night in a Workhouse”’ (with Stephen Donovan) Victorian Studies 63.3 (2021): 401-30.

‘“The Turn of the Screw” on the Turntable’, Henry James Review 41.3 (2020): 233-246.

‘The Confessions of a Synesthetic Reader’, Configurations 28.3 (2020): 333-358.

‘Introduction to “Aurality and Literacy’ (with Christopher Cannon), PMLA 135.2 (2020): 350-356.

‘Reader’s Block: Alexia, Neurological Reading Disorders, and the Postliterate Condition’, Literature and Medicine 37.2 (2019): 251-277.

‘Ulysses, Blindness, and Accessible Modernism’, New Literary History 49.1 (2018): 47-70.

‘From Shell Shock to Shellac: The Great War, Blindness, and Britain’s Talking Book Library’, Twentieth Century British History 26.1 (2015): 1-25.

‘Thomas Edison’s Poetry Machine’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 18 (2014)

‘Canned Literature: The Book after Edison’, Book History 16 (2013): 216-46.

‘The Victorian Walkman’, Victorian Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Victorian Studies 38.2 (Fall 2012): 9-13.

‘Margins of Print: Ephemera, Print Culture, and Lost Histories of the Newspaper’, Introduction (with H.G. Cocks) to special issue of Media History 18.1 (2012): 1-5

‘Victorian Print Culture, Journalism, and The Novel’, Literature Compass 7.4 (March 2010): 290-300

Roundtable on Géraldine Muhlmann, A Political History of Journalism for Media History 16.4 (2010): 423-27

‘Victorian Literature Out Loud: Digital Audio Resources for the Classroom’, Journal of Victorian Culture14.1 (April 2009): 134-40

‘Henry James, in Short’, the Henry James Review 29.3 (Fall 2008): 222-228

‘Bleak House in Real Time’, English Language Notes 46.1 (Spring/Summer 2008): 113-18

‘Play It Again, Sam Weller: New Digital Audiobooks and Old Ways of Reading’, Journal of Victorian Culture 13.1 (Spring 2008): 58-79

‘Wishing to Be Interviewed in Henry James’s The Reverberator’, Henry James Review 28.1 (February 2007): 57-72

‘Unspoken Intimacy in Henry James’s “The Papers”’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 61.3 (December 2006): 343-367

‘Joseph Conrad’s “Wild Story of a Journalist”’, ELH 71.3 (Fall 2004): 751-774

Book Chapters:

‘Podcasts, Audiobooks, and Podiobooks’, Routledge Companion to Literary Media (New York: Routledge, 2023), 174-184.

‘Book Audio’, The Unfinished Book, ed. Alexandra Gillespie and Deidre Lynch (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020), 136-150.

‘A Transatlantic Sensation: Stanley’s Search for Livingstone and the Anglo-American Press’, in U.S. Popular Print Culture, 1860-1920 (Oxford History of Popular Print Culture Series), ed. Christine Bold (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011)

‘Journalism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Culture, ed. Francis O’Gorman (Cambridge University Press, 2010): 177-94

‘Journalism’, in Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Novel and Novel Theory, ed. Peter Logan (Oxford: Blackwell, 2011): 455-59

‘Science and Technology’, in Conrad in Context, ed. Allan H. Simmons (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009): 237-44

Reference:

‘The Harvard Vocarium’, United States Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry (August 2014) 

‘Talking Books’, Nineteenth-Century Disability: A Digital Reader (March 2013)

‘On Henry Morton Stanley’s Search for Dr. Livingstone, 1871-72’, BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net (February 2012)

See also my Queen Mary Research Publications profile

Supervision

I would welcome enquiries from potential doctoral students interested in any of the areas of my research.

Public Engagement

• Op-ed, ‘Why Spotify’s New Audiobook Streaming Could Kill Off Reading Forever’, The Independent (London), February 11, 2024, https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/spotify-streaming-audiobooks-audible-literature-reading-b2494035.html
• Interview: ‘The Audiobook’s Century-Long Overnight Success’, Phantom Power podcast (November 3, 2023), https://phantompod.org/audiobooks/
• Interview: Sam Apple, ‘Tolstoy and Chill’, The Atlantic (June 21, 2023), https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2023/06/audiobook-format-history-reading-criticism/674460/
• Interview: ‘My Life in Books with Red Szell: Part 2’, AMI (June 19, 2023), https://www.ami.ca/My-Life-Books/recent_episodes
• Interview: ‘My Life in Books with Red Szell: Part 1’, AMI (June 5, 2023), https://www.ami.ca/My-Life-Books/recent_episodes
• Interview: ‘The History of the Audiobook’, Audible (May 15, 2023), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwTDK7gIFGQ
• Interviewed for BBC Radio 4’s ‘Last Word’ (March 3, 2023), https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001jlc6
• Interviewed for ‘Discussing Sensation Novels with Professor Matthew Rubery’, YouTube (October 28, 2022), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JG1eStbNSRM
• Interviewed for BBC Radio 3’s ‘Free Thinking’ (October 6, 2022), https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001cgks
• Interviewed for The Audiobook Reader’s Review podcast, Episode 1, https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Episode-1-Interview-with-Prof-Matthew-Rubery-Podcast/B0B6ST4NXK?action_code=ASSGB149080119000H&share_location=pdp&shareTest=TestShare (July 17, 2022)
• Interviewed for BBC Radio 3’s ‘Free Thinking’ (November 11, 2021), http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b080xzm6
• Interviewed for “Mary Had a Little Lamb: The Rich History of Audiobooks,” Sunday Extra (16 May 2021), Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)
• ‘Bottled Authors: The Predigital Dream of the Audiobook’, Cabinet Magazine (March 16, 2021)
• ‘Stop Reading like a Critic’, Public Books (January 14, 2021)
• Cited in Tim Dowling, ‘“Your Throat Hurst. Your Brain Hurts”: The Secret Life of the Audiobook Star’, Guardian (November 16, 2019)
• Interviewed for Christine Ro, ‘The History and Current Decline of Abridged Audiobooks’, BookRiot (November 14, 2019)
• Interviewed for ‘Sound Recordings Are Weird’, SpokenWeb podcast, episode 2 (November 4, 2019)
• Interviewed for ‘Methodologies of Reading in a Neurodiverse World’, Discovery and Inspiration Podcast Series, National Humanities Center (September 8, 2019)
• Interviewed for ‘The Universal Page’, 99% Invisible, episode 360 (July 2, 2019)
• Interviewed for Nikhita Venugopal, ‘The Man Who Spoke ‘Game of Thrones” into Existence’ (May 9, 2019)
• Cited in ‘“Wearable” Books: The Rise of Sensory Fiction’, Independent (October 3, 2018)
• Interviewed on Mars Hill Audio Journal 140 (August 28, 2018)
• ‘Are Any Books Truly Unrecordable?’ AudioFile Magazine (April/May 2017): 10-11.
• Interviewed for ‘Read On Air’ Episode 1 ‘The History of the Talking Book’, RNIB Connect Radio (January 13, 2017)
• Interviewed for Catherine Nixey, ‘Let me tell you a story: Why the stars want to do audiobooks’, The Times (January 9, 2017)
• Interviewed for ‘How the audiobook went from a resource for the blind to a popular form of storytelling’, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s ‘q’ (January 5, 2017)
• Interviewed for BBC Radio 4’s The World Tonight (December 26, 2016)
• Interviewed for The Kindle Chronicles (December 23, 2016)
• Interviewed for ‘The Christmas Tale Spoken Record that Launched the Audiobook’, Smithsonian Magazine (December 2016), 17.
• Interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Open Book’ (November 27, 2016)
• Interviewed for ‘World’s first audiobook tells its tale again’, The Times (November 22, 2016)
• Interviewed on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s ‘As It Happens’ (November 21, 2016)
• Interviewed for ‘Unique copy of first full-length audio book found in Canada’, Guardian (November 21, 2016)
• Interviewed on National Public Radio (NPR), ‘On Point’ (November 17, 2016)
• Interviewed on BBC Radio 3’s ‘Free Thinking’ (November 3, 2016)
• Interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s World at One (October 17, 2016)
• Interviewed for Insight Radio’s ‘Talking Books at 80’ documentary (November 6, 2015)
• Interviewed on BBC Radio 3’s “Free Thinking” (7 April 2015)
• ‘From Shell Shock to Shellac: The Great War, Blindness, and Britain’s Talking Book Library’, BookBrunch (1 July 2014)
• Interviewed for ‘Does the Digital Age Spell the End of Braille?’ The Independent (21 May 2014)
• Interview: Shelagh Fogarty programme on BBC Radio 5 Live (21 May 2014)
• Interview: ‘Q&A with Newspaper Researchers: Matthew Rubery’ for Europeana Newspapers (8 January 2014)
• ‘Audiobooks before Audiobooks: Matthew Rubery Interviews Barbara Holdridge’, Los Angeles Review of Books (18 August 2013)
• '“Talking to Myself”: An Interview with Toni Morrison’ (28 June 2013) 
• Interviewed by Michael Rosen on BBC Radio 4’s “Word of Mouth” (22 January 2013)
• 14 short documentary videos on literary topics for Deepbook Productions’ electronic book edition of Dickens’s Great Expectations (2011)
• Podcast recording with Josey Packard and Christina Davis for Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room: “On Harvard Vocarium Founder Frederick C. Packard” (2012)