Contact

I am a Professor of English at Idaho State University. My research and teaching focus on twentieth-century literature and culture, with special emphasis on the relationship between modernism and popular forms. Broadly speaking, my work examines how a variety of figures–from novelists and magazine editors to cartoonists and filmmakers–blend elements of experimental and popular forms to achieve particular effects, and thereby shaped the media landscape of the early twentieth century in ways we are only beginning to recognize.

My first book, Violent Minds: Modernism and the Criminal (Cambridge University Press, 2019), constructs a genealogy of criminality in modernist fiction 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 detective fiction in order to develop those representations, Violent Minds demonstrates how a fascination with criminality underlies several modernist engagements with subjectivity, genre fiction, and experimental narrative.

My second book, The New Old Style: Anachronism in Contemporary Comics (University of Nebraska Press, Encapsulations: Critical Comics Studies series, forthcoming in August 2026), asks why so many contemporary cartoonists have adopted the visual registers of the early twentieth century, producing work meant to appear much older than it actually is. I argue that this practice, which I term the “anachronistic aesthetic,” represents a significant form of experimentation in the comics medium by demonstrating the potential for critique inherent in the art object deliberately out of sync with the moment of its production.

I have recently begun work on a new book about modernism and seriality, tentatively titled “Time and Again: Modernism and the Form of the Series.” This book aims to show how and why serial forms have played an underappreciated yet pivotal role in shaping modernist aesthetics, and how experimentation with such forms of seriality allowed novelists, magazine editors, newspaper cartoonists, and filmmakers to manipulate their audiences’ experiences of temporality (both narrative time and the time of reading), characterization, and plot. In this project, I make the case for the serial work of art, too often dismissed as a purely commercial endeavor, as uniquely suited to developing the experimental imperatives of modernism within a media ecology saturated with serial forms.

This project speaks to my broader interests in popular forms–especially crime fiction, comics, and periodicals–that explicitly or implicitly blur the lines between convention and experiment, and in how those works complicate our understanding of cultural capital, aesthetic value, and generic definition. I have edited three special issues of scholarly journals on these topics: an issue of the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies on “Seriality,” where I contributed an essay on Dick Tracy and the narrative temporality of daily newspaper comics; an issue of The New Americanist on “Comics in Twenty-First-Century American Life”; and an essay cluster on “Modernism in Comics” for Modernism/modernity Print Plus, to which I contributed a piece on anachronism in the comics of Canadian cartoonist Seth. I am currently writing two new essays: one on the late fiction of Gertrude Stein, and one on the popular modernism of New Yorker cartoonist Peter Arno.

I also have broader interests in scholarly editing. With Elizabeth Sheehan, I am the Co-Editor of the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, and I am currently preparing two book-length edited works: 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, and the Cambridge Companion to American Comics, which I’m editing for Cambridge University Press.

I received my PhD in English at the University of Washington, and earned a BA in English at Vanderbilt University. Before coming to Idaho State, I taught for five years in the College Writing Program at Harvard University, and I still serve as a faculty member of the Harvard Summer School. In Spring 2022, I was in residence in Poland as the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Humanities and Social Sciences at the American Studies Center, University of Warsaw.

Contact: matthewlevay_at_isu_dot_edu