Patricia A. Matthew, 2022–23 - National Humanities Center

Patricia A. Matthew (NHC Fellow, 2022–23)

Project Title

Gender, Sugar, and the Afterlives of Abolition

Anthony E. Kaye Fellowship, 2022–23

Associate Professor of English, Montclair State University


Patricia A. Matthew is a specialist in the history of the novel, Romantic-era fiction, and British abolitionist culture. She has edited special issues of the journals Romantic Pedagogy CommonsEuropean Romantic Review, and Studies in Romanticism and published articles and reviews in Women’s Writing, the Keats-Shelley Journal, and Texas Studies in Literature and Language. Her essays on race and the Regency have been published in The AtlanticLapham’s Quarterly, and the Times Literary Supplement. She is coeditor of Oxford University Press’s series Race in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture and will edit Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park for W.W. Norton. 

Her first book, Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), was an edited volume about the experiences of faculty of color in higher education. Her diversity research has been published in PMLAThe College Language Association JournalSigns: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and The New Inquiry. It has also been featured in The Chronicle of Higher EducationInside Higher Education, and on New York Public Radio’s The Brian Lehrer Show. In 2020–2021, she was a Center for Diversity Innovation Distinguished Visiting Scholar at SUNY Buffalo. Her current book project is a study of gender politics in Britain’s abolitionist culture and contemporary Black art. It is under an advance contract with Princeton University Press.

Selected Publications

Written/Unwritten

  • Matthew, Patricia A. “Pain, Desire and Glitz: Historical Drama and Questions of Representation.” Times Literary Supplement, May 6, 2022.
  • Matthew, Patricia A., ed. Studies in Romanticism 61, no. 1 Race, Blackness, and Romanticism (Spring 2022).
  • Matthew, Patricia A. “‘A Daemon Whom I had Myself Created’: Race, Frankenstein, and Monstering.” In Frankenstein in Theory: A Critical Anatomy, edited by Orrin Wang, 173-83. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2021.
  • Matthew Patricia A. “Jane Austen and the Abolitionist Turn.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 61, no. 4 (Winter 2019): 345-61.
  • Matthew, Patricia A., ed. Written/Unwritten Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.
Return to current fellows