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Matthew Levay
Professor of English; CAL Faculty Research Development Fellow
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. My work examines how a variety of figures–from novelists and magazine editors to cartoonists and filmmakers–in blending modernism’s experimental aesthetics with the conventions of popular culture, came to shape the broader 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 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. My second book, The New Old Style: Anachronism in Contemporary Comics (forthcoming in 2026 with the University of Nebraska Press, in their Encapsulations: Critical Comics Studies series), 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,” which examines the underappreciated yet pivotal role of serial forms—including novel series, magazines, film serials, and newspaper comics--in shaping modernist aesthetics.
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 editing the Cambridge Companion to American Comics (Cambridge University Press) while also preparing a scholarly edition of Wyndham Lewis’s jointly-published novels The Human Age: Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta for Oxford University Press’s Collected Works of Wyndham Lewis.
Finally, I am committed to scholarly collaboration. I serve as the Faculty Research Development Fellow for the College of Arts and Letters, where I support College faculty as they develop their research agendas and apply for internal and external funding opportunities. If you’re a CAL faculty member working on a new project, at any stage, let’s talk!
*Complete CV available online at matthewlevay.com
Selected Honors and Awards
Franklin Research Grant, American Philosophical Society, Summer 2025.
Outstanding Faculty Advisor Award, Advising Community at Idaho State, 2025.
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.
Books
The New Old Style: Anachronism in Contemporary Comics (University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming in August 2026).
Violent Minds: Modernism and the Criminal (Cambridge University Press, 2019).
Edited Volumes and Journal Issues
The Cambridge Companion to American Comics (Cambridge University Press, in process).
Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta: The Human Age, Books Two and Three (Oxford University Press, Collected Works of Wyndham Lewis, under contract).
“Modernism in Comics,” essay cluster for Modernism/modernity Print Plus 9, cycle 3 (May 2025).
“Comics in 21st-Century American Life,” co-edited special issue of the New Americanist 2, no. 1 (May 2023).
“Seriality,” special issue of the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 9, no. 1 (2018).
Recent Articles and Book Chapters
“Highsmith’s Advice: Suspense, How-To, and the Limitations of Genre,” New Literary History (forthcoming).
“Vintage Seth: Comics against Nostalgia,” Modernism/modernity Print Plus 9, cycle 3 (May 2025).
“Little Tommy Lost and the Anachronistic Comic,” in Comics and Modernism: History, Form, and Culture, ed. Jonathan Najarian (University Press of Mississippi, 2024), 284-300.
“Crime Fiction and Criminology,” in 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, no. 3 (September 2019): 543-562.
“On the Uses of Seriality for Modern Periodical Studies: An Introduction,” Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 9, no. 1 (2018): v-xix.
“Repetition, Recapitulation, Routine: Dick Tracy and the Temporality of Daily Newspaper Comics,” Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 9, no. 1 (2018): 101-122.
“Preservation and Promotion: Ellery Queen, Magazine Publishing, and the Marketing of Detective Fiction,” in 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
4473/5573: 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 3391: Honors Seminar ("What Comics Can Do")
HONS 1102: Honors Humanities II
HONS 1101: Honors Humanities I