Matthew Smalley is a scholar of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature and culture. His research and teaching focus primarily on the cultural work of mid-nineteenth century US literature, the writings of Toni Morrison, and the significance of literary studies in a liberal arts education. He believes that classrooms are transformative spaces that enable unique, vitalizing encounters with texts, other people, and ourselves. When he’s not engaged in scholarly activity, he enjoys spending time with his family, cooking, fly-fishing, and doing anything involving basketball.
He is the author of Resistance and the Sermon in American Literature: The Cultural Work of Literary Preaching from Emerson to Morrison (Bloomsbury Academic). His scholarship has appeared in MELUS, College Literature, Studies in the Novel, Aethlon: Journal of Sports Literature, and others.
Learning & Teaching
- W101: Novices, Guides, and the Art of Living Well
- ENG 130: American Literature Prior to 1900; Or, Beginnings to Beginning Again
Works
Book
- Resistance and the Sermon: The Cultural Work of Literary Preaching from Emerson to Morrison. Bloomsbury Academic, 2024. (Released in paperback 2026).
Articles
- “Melville’s Mortuary Pedagogy: The Sapiential Epitaph and the Wisdom of Solomon.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 52, no. 3, 2020, pp. 246-268.
- “Adapting the Sermon: The Anxieties of Literary Preaching in The Bluest Eye.” Toni Morrison and Adaptation, special issue of College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies, edited by Stacie McCormick and Rhaisa Williams, vol. 47, no. 4, 2020, pp. 777-809.
- “The Unchurched Preacher and the Circulated Sermon: Literary Preaching in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, vol. 43, no. 2, 2018, pp. 29-52.
- “Exhuming History: Charles Brockden Brown and the Politics of the Corpse.” Four Score of American Literature, vol. 1, 2019, pp. 1-29.
- “‘Alone Triumphant’: Jack Johnson and American Culture from Popular Melodrama to Faulknerian Modernism.” Aethlon: A Journal of Sport and Literature, vol. 31, no. 2, 2014, pp. 15-36. [Reprinted in Teaching Sport Literature, special issue of Aethlon: A Journal of Sport and Literature, vol. 36, no. 2, 2019, pp. 149-170.]