Matthew Levay
Associate Professor of English
Office: LA 239
EDUCATION
PhD, English (2009), University of Washington
MA, English (2004), University of Washington
BA, English (2002), Vanderbilt University
My research and teaching focus on twentieth-century literature and culture, with special emphasis on the relationship between modernism and popular forms, and on how authors, editors, artists, and filmmakers blend elements of the two to achieve particular effects. My work deals equally with novels, comics, magazines, genre fictions, and films in an effort to understand how this array of forms—both popular and avant-garde—shaped the broader media landscape of the early twentieth century.
My first book, Violent Minds: Modernism and the Criminal (Cambridge University Press, 2019), constructs a genealogy of criminality in modernist fiction in England and America from the late nineteenth century to the 1950s, examining a range of modernist authors who explored new modes of psychological representation through the figure of the criminal, and who drew upon works of crime and detective fiction in order to develop those representations. I have recently completed a second book manuscript, “The New Old Style: Anachronism in Contemporary Comics,” which asks why so many recent cartoonists adopt the styles of early twentieth-century popular visual culture, producing work meant to appear much older than it actually is.
I’m currently at work on a new book project. “Time and Again: Modernism and the Form of the Series” examines the underappreciated yet pivotal role of serial forms—including novel series, magazines, film serials, and newspaper comics--in shaping modernist aesthetics. This project shows how experimentation with seriality allowed a wide variety of artists to manipulate their audiences’ experiences of narrative time, characterization, and plot, affirming the experimental imperatives of modernism within a media ecology saturated with serial forms.
I also have an abiding interest in scholarly editing; I am the Co-Editor, with Elizabeth Sheehan, of the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies (Penn State University Press), and I am preparing a scholarly edition of Wyndham Lewis’s The Human Age: Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta for Oxford University Press’s Collected Works of Wyndham Lewis. Finally, I am committed to international collaboration: in Spring 2022 I taught in Poland at the University of Warsaw’s American Studies Center, where I was the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Humanities and Social Sciences.
*Complete CV available online at matthewlevay.com
Selected Honors and Awards
Fulbright US Scholar Award, Distinguished Chair in Humanities and Social Sciences, American Studies Center, University of Warsaw, Poland, Spring 2022.
Idaho State University Outstanding Master Teacher Award, 2021.
Modernist Studies Association Research Travel Grant, Winter 2019.
Idaho Humanities Council Research Fellowship, Spring 2016.
Harvard University Certificate of Teaching Excellence (six-time recipient 2010-2013).
Harry Ransom Center Research Fellowship, University of Texas at Austin, Summer 2011. Awarded through the Erle Stanley Gardner Endowment for Mystery Studies.
Book
Violent Minds: Modernism and the Criminal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
Edited Journal Issues
“Modernism in Comics,” essay cluster for Modernism/modernity Print Plus (forthcoming).
“Comics in 21st-Century American Life,” co-edited special issue of the New Americanist 2.1 (May 2023).
“Seriality,” special issue of the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 9.1 (2018).
Recent Articles and Book Chapters
“Vintage Seth,” Modernism/modernity Print Plus (forthcoming).
“Little Tommy Lost and the Anachronistic Comic,” Comics and Modernism: History, Form, and Culture, ed. Jonathan Najarian (University Press of Mississippi, 2024), 284-300.
“Crime Fiction and Criminology,” The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction, ed. Janice M. Allan, Jesper Gulddal, Stewart King, and Andrew Pepper (Routledge, 2020), 273-281.
“Modernism’s Opposite: John Galsworthy and the Novel Series,” Modernism/modernity 26.3 (September 2019): 543-562.
“On the Uses of Seriality for Modern Periodical Studies: An Introduction,” Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 9.1 (2018): v-xix.
“Repetition, Recapitulation, Routine: Dick Tracy and the Temporality of Daily Newspaper Comics,” Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 9.1 (2018): 101-122.
“Preservation and Promotion: Ellery Queen, Magazine Publishing, and the Marketing of Detective Fiction,” The Centrality of Crime Fiction in American Literary Culture, ed. Alfred Bendixen and Olivia Carr Edenfield (Routledge, 2017), 101-122.
Courses Taught
6635: Graduate Seminar in Teaching ("Teaching Comics")
6632: Graduate Seminar in Teaching Literature (“Teaching Difficult Literature”)
6625: Graduate Seminar in a Literary Period (Modernism)
6612: Introduction to Graduate Studies in English
6610: Careers in English
4472/5572: Major Authors (James Joyce's Ulysses)
4469/5569: Twenty-First-Century Literature
4468/5568: Twentieth-Century Literature
3327: Special Topics in Genre: Comics
3323: Studies in Fiction (“How Novels Work”)
3311: Literary Criticism and Theory
3305: The Art of Film II (“The Art of Animation”)
2268: Survey of British Literature II
2211: Introduction to Literary Analysis
1126: The Art of Film I
1102: Writing and Rhetoric II
HONS 1102: Honors Humanities II
HONS 1101: Honors Humanities I