Rate My Professor Kristin Matthews

Kristin L. Matthews is a Professor of English at Brigham Young University in the College of Humanities, specializing in twentieth-century American literature and culture, particularly Cold War fiction and film, with a sub-specialty in twentieth-century African-American literature. She earned her B.A. in English, summa cum laude, from Brigham Young University in 1995, her M.A. in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1997, and her Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2004, with a dissertation entitled “The Re(a)d Menace: Cold War Fiction and the Politics of Reading.” Matthews joined the Department of English at BYU as an Assistant Professor in 2004, advancing to full Professor. Since 2011, she has been the Program Coordinator of BYU’s American Studies Program and holds affiliations with Global Women’s Studies and Africana Studies. Her research utilizes an American Studies approach, integrating literature with political, historical, sociological, and popular culture materials to analyze American literature and society. She teaches courses in American literature and culture.

Matthews' monograph Reading America: Citizenship, Democracy, and Cold War Literature was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2016. The book examines how reading shaped concepts of citizenship and democracy in Cold War America, featuring analyses of works by J.D. Salinger, Ralph Ellison, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, and Maxine Hong Kingston amid debates by great books proponents, New Critics, civil rights leaders, postmodernists, neoconservatives, and multiculturalists. Her articles appear in journals including American Studies, Arizona Quarterly, Modern Drama, Book History, Journal of American Culture, Journal of Popular Culture, and CEA Critic. Select publications are “The Politics of ‘Home’ in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun” (Modern Drama, 2008), “A Mad Proposition in Postwar America” (Journal of American Culture, 2007), and “The ABCs of Mad Magazine: Reading, Citizenship, and Cold War America” (International Journal of Comic Art, 2006). She has earned awards such as the Women’s Research Initiative Grant (BYU Global Women’s Studies, 2021-2022), American Studies Professor of the Year (2016, 2007), English Department Teaching Award (2008), Faculty Women’s Association Teaching Award (2012), Alcuin Fellowship (BYU, 2012), Albert J. Colton Fellowship (Utah Humanities Council, 2010), and Raymond and Ida Lee Beckham Prize (2015).