Rate My Professor Matthew Sivils

Matthew Wynn Sivils is the Liberal Arts and Sciences Dean’s Professor and Professor of American Literature in the Department of English at Iowa State University, where he directs the Center for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities, a role he began on July 1, 2022. He joined the Iowa State faculty in 2008 after completing his Ph.D. and M.A. in English at Oklahoma State University and holding a tenure-line position for two years at a small liberal arts college. Sivils earned his B.S. in Fisheries and Wildlife Biology from Arkansas Tech University. He has served as Associate Chair for Faculty Development and Associate Chair for Operations in the Department of English and participated in the Emerging Leaders Academy.

Sivils specializes in early American literature, American Gothic, and environmental studies. His publications include the monograph American Environmental Fiction, 1782-1847 (2016), which traces environmental themes in early American novels; an edition of Errington's Of Men and Marshes (2012); and co-editor of Ecogothic in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Nature, Form, and the Gothic Sublime (2018). Recent articles feature “Introduction: The Proliferation of the Ecogothic” in Studies in American Fiction (2023); “‘Some Dark Imagined Sculptor:’ Hawthorne’s Ecogothic Rocks” in Nathaniel Hawthorne Review (2023); “‘That Noisome and Contagious Receptacle’: Quarantine and Horror in Charles Brockden Brown’s ‘The Man at Home’” in ANQ (2022); “Monstrous Stewardship and the Plantation in Chesnutt’s ‘The Goophered Grapevine’” in Stewardship and the Future of the Planet (2022); and “The African American Ecogothic of E. Levi Brown’s ‘At the Hermitage’” in Studies in American Fiction (2020). He is editing a scholarly edition of Harriet Prescott Spofford’s 1860 Gothic novel Sir Rohan’s Ghost. In teaching courses such as ENGL 5430: The Study of Environmental Literature, he promotes appreciation of environmental literature to encourage stewardship of the natural world.

Sivils has earned the Exemplary Faculty Mentor Award from Iowa State University in 2015 and 2017; the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Award for Mid-Career Achievement in Research (2016) and Early Achievement in Research (2013); the CEAH Fellowship (2015); and the Distinguished Alumni Award from Oklahoma State University College of Arts & Sciences (2016).