School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies

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Matthew Pethers

Associate Professor in American Intellectual and Cultural History, Faculty of Arts

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Expertise Summary

My research interests are in the literary, intellectual and cultural history of America between the early eighteenth century and the Civil War, and particularly: matters of form and aesthetics; book history and periodical culture; the origins of American Romanticism; ideas of labor and knowledge during the antebellum period; early American drama; transatlantic cultural relations.

Teaching Summary

I am currently and have recently supervised PhD students working on: Ralph Waldo Emerson; John Jay; American loyalism and emotions history; racial liminality in nineteenth-century American fiction;… read more

Research Summary

I am currently working on a book project entitled Unfinished Histories: The Invention and Interpretation of Historical Fragments in America from Antiquarianism to Romanticism. Focusing on both the… read more

Selected Publications

  • PETHERS, M., 2017. Transportation Narratives: Servants, Convicts, and the Literature of Colonization in British America. In: PAUL LAUTER and NICHOLAS COLES, eds., The History of American-Working Class Literature Cambridge University Press. 7-24
  • PETHERS, M., 2016. Dead Letters and the Secret Life of the State in Nineteenth Century America. In: BERNIER, C. M., NEWMAN, J. and PETHERS, M., eds., The Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing Edinburgh University Press. 136-51
  • PETHERS, M., BERNIER, C. M. and NEWMAN, J., 2016. Introduction: Epistolary Studies and Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing. In: PETHERS, M., BERNIER, C. M. and NEWMAN, J., eds., The Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing Edinburgh University Press. 11-28
  • PETHERS, M., 2014. The Secret Witness: Thinking, and Not Thinking, About Servants in the Early American Novel. In: ANDREW LAWSON, ed., Created Unequal: Class and the Making of American Literature Routledge. 40-55

BOOK REVIEWS

Review of Urban Rehearsals and Novel Plots in the Early American City by Betsy Klimasmith. In The Review of English Studies 73.312 (2022): 983-86

Review of Yankee Yarns: Storytelling and the Invention of the National Body in Nineteenth-Century American Culture by Stefanie Schäfer. In American Literary History Online Review Series XXII (2022): 1536-39 https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajac170

Review of Novels in the Time of Democratic Writing: The American Example by Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse. In Early American Literature 54.1 (2019): 271-281.

Review of The Illiberal Imagination: Class and the Rise of the U.S. Novel by Joe Shapiro. In Studies in the Novel 50.4 (2018): 595-598

Review of Propaganda 1776: Secrets, Leaks, and Revolutionary Communications in Early America by Russ Castronovo. In The British Association for Romantic Studies Review 47 (2016): www.bars.ac.uk/review/index.php/barsreview/article/view/162/448

Review of New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649-1859 by Elizabeth Maddock Dillon. In Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations 19.1 (2015): 109-113

Review of The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture by Jared Gardner. In Amerikastudien/American Studies 59.4 (2015): http://dgfa.de/wp-content/uploads/1_Pethers.pdf

Review of Protocols of Liberty: Communication Innovation and the American Revolution by William B. Warner. In Literature and History 23.2 (2014): 92-94.

Review of Unfinished Revolution: The Early American Republic in a British World by Sam W. Haynes. In Journal of American Studies 46.4 (2012): E1-4.

Review of Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America by Wendy Bellion. In Journal of American Studies 46.3 (2012): 767-768.

Review of A History of the Book in America - Volume II: An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790-1840 ed. Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley. In Journal of American Studies 46.2 (2012): E10-20.

Review of The Two Faces of American Freedom by Aziz Rana. In Journal of American Studies 45.3 (2011): E1-3.

Review of Atlantic Republic: The American Tradition in English Literature by Paul Giles. In Journal of American Studies 43.2 (2009): 377-379.

Review of Men of Letters in the Early Republic: Cultivating Forums of Citizenship by Catherine O'Donnell Kaplan. In The William and Mary Quarterly 65.3 (July 2008): 627-630.

SHORTER PUBLICATIONS

"The Indentured Atlantic: Bound Servitude and the Literature of American Colonization - Part 1." U. S. Studies Online (January 2016). http://www.baas.ac.uk/usso/the-indentured-atlantic-bound-servitude-and-the-literature-of-american-colonization-part-one/

"The Indentured Atlantic: Bound Servitude and the Literature of American Colonization - Part 2." U.S. Studies Online (January 2016). http://www.baas.ac.uk/usso/the-indentured-atlantic-bound-servitude-and-the-literature-of-american-colonization-part-two/

"The Indentured Atlantic: Bound Servitude and the Literature of American Colonization - Part 3." U.S. Studies Online (January 2016). http://www.baas.ac.uk/usso/the-indentured-atlantic-bound-servitude-and-the-literature-of-american-colonization-part-three/

"Journalism." In The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of the American Enlightenment, Volume 2, ed. Mark G. Spencer (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 592-99.

Introduction to "Online Roundtable: A History of the Book in America." In Journal of American Studies 46.2 (2012): E1-3.

"Thomas Cooper." In The Dictionary of Early American Philosophers, Volume 1, ed. John R. Shook (New York: Continuum, 2012), 244-47.

SELECTED CONFERENCE PAPERS AND TALKS

March 2024: "Unexpected Endings: Social Crisis, Form, and the Antebellum Fragment," C19: Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Conference, Pasadena.

March 2024: "Posthumous Fragments and the Editing of the Authorial Corpus in Early Nineteenth Century America," Unfolding Editorship Seminar, C19: Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Conference, Pasadena.

March 2024: "Speaking in Ancient Tongues: Historical Conjecture and the Early American Fragment," Voices and Agencies: America and the Atlantic, 1600-1865, Essen.

December 2023: "Nathaniel Hawthorne, Contemporaneous Literary Fragments, and the Waste of Textual Overproduction." Refuse/Refusal: Fifth Biennial Conference of the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, University of Bristol.

June 2023: "When Was the First American Novel? Temporal Anachronism and the Long, Late Publication of William Williams's Mr. Penrose (1776/1815/1969)." Society of Early Americanists Biennial Conference, University of Maryland.

March 2022: "When Was the First American Novel? Temporal Anachronism and the Long, Late Publication of William Williams's Mr. Penrose (1776/1815/1969)." C19: Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Conference, Miami.

February 2022 (invited): "Nobody's Talkin' At Me: Fictionality and the Servant's Voice in Early American Literature." Voices and Agencies: America and the Atlantic, 1600-1865, JFK Institute, Berlin.

October 2021: "A Recipe for Disaster: Social Crisis, Form, and the Early American Fragment." Past Futures: Thinking in Crisis, Thirteenth Biennial Conference of the Charles Brockden Brown Society, Brown University.

March 2021: "X Marks the Spot: Charles Brockden Brown's Monthly Magazine and Periodical Publication." Society of Early Americanists Biennial Conference.

December 2019: "What is an Instalment? Narrative Scales and the Nineteenth-Century Periodical," Scaling the Nineteenth Century, Fourth Biennial Conference of the British Assocation of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, University of Nottingham/Nottingham Trent University.

October 2019: "Arthur Mervyn's Closet: or, Charles Brockden Brown's Servant Problem, and Ours," Dissent of the Governed: C18 to C21, Twelfth Biennial Conference of the Charles Brockden Brown Society, University of Kentucky.

September 2019: "Seriality, Serialization, Series: Textual Temporalities and the Gendering of Post-Revolutionary American Fiction," Serial Gendered Subjects: Periodicals Identities, Communities, Northumbria University.

March 2019: "Serial Poetics, American Periodical Culture, and the Problem of the Picaresque," Society of Early Americanists Biennial Conference, Eugene, Oregon.

May 2018 (invited): "Suspense/Desire/Repetition: Serial Poetics and the Early American Novel," Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies, Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz.

May 2018: "'An Executioner in the Civil State': Periodical Culture and the Reimagining of Social Authority in Jeffersonian America," American Counter/Publics - Annual Meeting of the German Association for American Studies, Berlin.

March 2018: "Going Postal: Distribution Networks and the Form of the Nineteenth Century Magazine," Climate - Fifth Biennial Conference of the Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, Albuquerque, New Mexico.

November 2017: "When Was the First American Novel?: Belatedness, Anachronism, and the Long Publication of William Williams's Mr. Penrose (1776/1815/1966)," The 'Not Yet' of the Nineteenth Century - Third Biennial Symposium of the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, University of Exeter.

October 2017: "Portrait Miniatures: Physiognomy, Providence, and the Transatlantic Circulation of Wealth in the Post-1800 American Novel," Migration, Diaspora, Circulation and Translation - Eleventh Biennial Conference of the Charles Brockden Brown Society, University College Dublin.

September 2017: "Early American Periodical Culture and the Problem of the Picaresque," Magazines on the Move - Network of American Periodical Studies Symposium, Nottingham Trent University.

June 2017: "Dead Letters! Does it Not Sound Like Dead Networks? or, Bartleby the Scrivener: A Tale of the Post Office," Melville's Crossings - Eleventh International Melville Conference, King's College London.

April 2017: "The Detective in the Dead Letter Office: Legal Surveillance and the Nineteenth-Century Communications Network," British Association for American Studies Annual Conference, Canterbury Christ Church University.

March 2017: "Seriality, Serialization, Series: Textual Temporalities and the Legitimation of Post-Revolutionary American Fiction," Society of Early Americanists Biennial Conference, Tulsa, Oklahoma.

March 2017 (respondent): "Beyond Allegories of Nation: Early American Novels as Indices of Political Possibility," Society of Early Americanists Biennial Conference, Tulsa, Oklahoma.

May 2016: "What, When and Where Was the First American Novel?" Unpublished America Symposium, University of Birmingham

December 2015: "Going Postal: Distribution Networks and the Form of the Nineteenth-Century Magazine." American into Periodicals Studies - Network of American Periodical Studies Symposium, British Library.

November 2015: "'Dead Letters! Does it Not Sound Like Dead Networks?': Bartleby the Postman." Keywords - Second Biennial Conference of the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, University of Warwick.

October 2015: "Electric Eels and the Penurious Gentry: Native Americans, Natural Philosophy, and the Making of Middle-Cass Identity in Edward Bancroft's The History of Charles Wentworth." Recording Nature in the Early Atlantic World, 1750-1830 - Tenth Biennial Conference of the Charles Brockden Brown Society, Ybor City, Tampa, Florida

September 2015: "Becoming Proletarian: William Moraley's Unaccountable Self." British Group of Early American Historians Annual Conference, University of Sheffield.

August 2015 (invited): "Transportation Stories: Servants, Convicts, and Class Formation in the Literature of Colonial America." Eccles Centre Summer Scholars Series, British Library.

April 2015 (invited): "A Vast Collection of Particular Truths: Thomas Dobson, Encyclopaedic Knowledge and Information Overload in Post-Revolutionary America." Olin Library, Rollins College, Florida.

April 2014: "Going Postal: Distribution Networks and the Form of the Nineteenth-Century Magazine." British Association for American Studies Annual Conference, University of Birmingham.

October 2013: "Secret Witnessing: The Uncanny Servant and the Early American Novel." Acts of Alienation and Sedition, 1780-1830 - Ninth Biennial Conference of the Charles Brockden Brown Society, Universite Paris IV - Sorbonne.

July 2013: "Before America's First Fictions: English Imports, Periodical Culture, and the Colonial Rise of the Novel." Roots, Routes, and Routs: American and British Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century, University of Plymouth.

March 2013: "Parabolic Social Mobility and the Circulation of Wealth in the Post-1800 American Novel." Society of Early Americanists Biennial Conference, Savannah, Georgia.

April 2012: "The Early American Novel in Fragments: Speculative Reading and Serial Fiction in the Late Eighteenth Century." Speculations: Aesthetics, Risk, and Capital in the Circum-Atlantic World - Eighth Biennial Conference of the Charles Brockden Brown Society, CUNY Graduate Center, New York.

April 2012: "Temporality and the Serial Novel." C19: Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Conference, Berkeley, California.

March 2011: "The Early American Novel in Fragments: Seriality and the Making of Late Eighteenth-Century Fiction." Society of Early Americanists Biennial Conference, Philadelphia.

May 2010: "An Executioner in the Civil State: Periodical Culture and the Reimagining of Social Authority in Jeffersonian America." C19: Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Conference, Penn State University and Research Society for American Periodicals Panel at the American Literature Association Conference, San Francisco.

March 2010 (invited): "A Peculiar Craft: The Problem of Social Knowledge in Late Eighteenth-Century America." American History Research Seminar, Cambridge University and Critical MASS: Manchester American Studies Seminar, University of Manchester.

December 2009: "Brother Jonathan Meets John Bull: The Transatlantic Iconography of the Yankee, 1776-1830." Separateness and Kinship: Transatlantic Exchanges Between New England Britain, 1600-1900, University of Plymouth.

July 2009: "Before America's First Fictions: English Imports, Periodical Culture, and the Colonial Rise of the Novel." Narrative Dominions: on Writing the History of the Novel in English, Institute of English Studies, University of London.

May 2009: "Globalizing the Republic of Letters: Language, Provincialism, and American Print Culture at the End of the Eighteenth Century." Society of Early Americanists Panel at the American Literature Association Conference, Boston.

June 2008: "'A Vast Collection of Particular Truths': Encyclopaedic Knowledge and Information Overload in Post-Revolutionary American Print Culture." Bibliographical Society of America Panel at the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing Conference, Oxford Brookes University.

March 2008: "The Empire of Letters: Native American Culture and the Diffusion of Knowledge in Late Eighteenth-Century America." British Association for American Studies Annual Conference, University of Edinburgh.

May 2007: "A Silent History: Notes toward a Reconstruction of the Colonial American Theatre." Southwest American Studies Forum, University of Exeter.

April 2006: "'That Grub-Street Sect': Partisan Politics and the Franklinian Image, 1790 - 1808." British Association for American Studies Annual Conference, University of Kent, Canterbury.

April 2005: "Legal Fictions: Charles Brockden Brown and the Emergence of Literary Discourse in Eighteenth-Century America." British Association for American Studies Annual Conference, University of Cambridge.

CONFERENCE ORGANIZATION

2023: Crime, Justice, and Cultures of Transgression in Early America: The 14th Biennial Conference of the Charles Brockden Brown Society, University of Nottingham.

2022: Opening Up, Fifth Biennial Conference of the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, King's College London (co-organized with the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists).

2019: Scaling the Nineteenth Century, Fourth Biennial Conference of the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, University of Nottingham/Nottingham Trent University (co-organized with Stephanie Palmer).

2019: Dissent of the Governed: C18 to C21, Twelfth Biennial Conference of the Charles Brockden Brown Society, University of Kentucky (co-organized with the Charles Brockden Brown Society).

2018: Content Stinks! The Forms, Materials, and Institutions of American Periodicals, University of Nottingham (co-organized with Graham Thompson).

2017: The 'Not Yet' of the Nineteenth Century, Third Biennial Conference of the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, University of Exeter (co-organized with the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists).

2011: Knowledge Networks: American Periodicals, Print Cultures, and Communities, University of Nottingham (co-organized with John Fagg and Robin Vandome).

In my role as Conference Coordinator for the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists I also organized more than twenty BrANCA-sponsored panels at the annual British Association for American Studies conference between 2017 and 2022.

AWARDS AND HONOURS

2021-23: President of the Charles Brockden Brown Society

2017-21: Elected Member of the Steering Committee of the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists

2017-21: Elected Member of the Advisory Board of the Charles Brockden Brown Society

2020: Society of Early Americanists Scholar of the Month

2015: Thomas P. Johnson Distinguished Visiting Scholar, Rollins College, Florida.

2014-15: Eccles Centre Fellowship, British Library.

2010-11: Early Career Research and Knowledge Transfer Grant, University of Nottingham.

2010: Overseas Conference Grant, British Academy.

2007: Barra International Fellowship, The Library Company of Philadelphia.

2006: Benjamin Franklin Fellowship, British Association for American Studies/US Embassy.

2005: Research Fellowship, JFK Insititute for North American Studies, Berlin.

2000-03: Postgraduate Research Degree Studentship, Arts and Humanities Research Council.

1999-2000: Postgraduate Taught Degree Studentship, Arts and Humanities Research Council.

ACADEMIC SERVICE

Reviewer of book and article manuscripts for: Oxford University Press; Cambridge University Press; Broadview Press; University of Wales Press; Early American Literature; Studies in American Fiction; Journal of American Studies; Journal of Early American History; Eighteenth-Century Studies; Journal of Social History; Literature and History; Religions; The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation; Papers on Language and Literature; English: Journal of the English Association; Huntington Library Quarterly.

Tenure/promotion panel evaluations for: University of Kent; Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

I am currently and have recently supervised PhD students working on: Ralph Waldo Emerson; John Jay; American loyalism and emotions history; racial liminality in nineteenth-century American fiction; landscape in nineteenth-century Californian literature; urban parks in the Reconstruction-era South; journalism and asylum reform; classical influences on the early American theatre; and transatlantic abolitionism.

My recent MRes supervisees include students working on: space and place in nineteenth-century Californian literature; the indigenous Gothic in Canadian literature; ecocriticism and twenty-first century American fiction; Alexander Hamilton; and sublime representations of Niagara Falls.

Modules I have taught within the Department of American and Canadian Studies include:

African American History and Culture;

American Enlightenment/American Gothic;

American Magazine Culture: Journalism, Advertising and Fiction from Independence to the Internet Age ;

The American Theatre;

American Literatiure 1 - Colonial Era to 1900;

American Literature 2 - 1900 to the Present;

Key Texts in American Social and Political Thought;

American Thought and Culture 1 - Settlement to World War 1;

American Thought and Culture 2 - World War 1 to the Present;

Identifiably American - An Honors Seminar;

and American Utopianism (for a brief introduction to the latter see my contribution to the School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies' "Words of the World" series on Youtube: http://youtu.be/RLxe0WKZYlA).

In the coming academic year I will be teaching once again on African American History and Culture and American Magazine Culture.

Current Research

I am currently working on a book project entitled Unfinished Histories: The Invention and Interpretation of Historical Fragments in America from Antiquarianism to Romanticism. Focusing on both the transatlantic republication and domestic creation of "invented fragments" - writings deliberately designed to resemble incomplete texts and often intended to convince the reader of their historical authenticity - in North America between 1740 and 1840, Unfinished Histories offers the first comprehensive analysis of this generically flexible and epistemologically ambiguous literary form in order to address a cluster of related questions about both the development of modern historical knowledge in the long eighteenth century and contemporary theoretical apprehensions of the past. What does the invented fragment tell us about the role of fictional reconstruction and imaginative inference in understanding ancient cultures during the Enlightenment? In what ways were invented fragments used to explore the unbreachable fissures between these ancient cultures and modern ideas, values, or events, and either celebrate or critique Enlightenment notions of progress? And what might the recovery of the invented fragment as a central tool for grappling with interpretive incompletion and aesthetic partiality have to teach us in our current efforts to wrestle with the challenges of an archive that is simultaneously expanding and decentring at new speed and marked in newly visible ways by gaps grounded in racialized and gendered disparities?

In taking American manifestations of the invented fragment for its corpus, Unfinished Histories considers a particularly fraught and revealing set of instances of this literary form's negotiation between different temporal and intellectual registers, given the pressing concern of writers in the colonies and early republic to find a "usable past" for their young civilization, their deep but conflicted cultural affinity with Anglo-European conceptions of classical and neoclassical "order," and the tensions inherent in the Revolution's advocacy of social equality in theory but not practice. Moreover, by focusing on the varied career of the American fragment over the decades around the turn of the nineteenth century I chart cultural and geographical territory that has barely been explored before, offering in effect a new history of the literary fragment distinct from the well-established focus of previous critics on British and German examples from the high Romantic era.

I also have a long-term research interest in the aesthetics and temporality of textual serialization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Treating seriality as a diverse phenomenon incorporating magazine instalments, fascicule volumes, republished editions and unofficial sequels and abridgements, as well as a wide rage of genres, I have explored how various American writers used strategies of narrative extension and interruption to establish the heteroglossic scope, mimetic realism and affective investment central to the development of American literary culture, and continue to work on this topic. An essay called "The Early American Novel in Fragments: Writing and Reading Serial Fiction in the Post-Revolutionary United States," which is drawn from this still-evolving project, can be found in New Directions in the History of the Novel, eds. Patrick Parrinder, Andrew Nash and Nicola Wilson (Palgrave, 2014), and more recent work in this vein has appeared in Nineteenth Century Studies and The Routledge Companion to the British and North American Literary Magazine.

Additionally, I have co-edited a collection of essays - The Part and the Whole in Early American Art, Literature and Print Culture - with Daniel Diez Couch which will appear with Bucknell University Press in April 2024, and I am currently working, with Hilary Emmett and Len von Morze, on editing Volume 2 of The Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown, which is contracted to appear from Bucknell University Press in 2022. More information on this volume and the Brown edition as a whole can be found here: http://brockdenbrown.cah.ucf.edu/volumes.php

I would be keen to work with students on any subject relating to the intellectual and cultural history of the Revolutionary period, and would also welcome inquiries from students more broadly interested in literary professionalism, periodical culture, the history of the book, American verse, aesthetic theory, transatlantic exchange, or the structure of knowledge between 1700 and 1860.

Past Research

In the recent past I collaborated with several colleagues in the Department of American Studies at Nottingham, and at the University of Birmingham, on a project which is concerned with the networks of production underpinning American periodical culture in the nineteenth century. The first stage of this project reached fruition in a symposium, entitled Knowledge Networks: American Periodicals, Print Cultures, and Communities which took place at the University of Nottingham in May 2011 with funding from an internal Early Career and Knowledge Transfer grant. A special issue of American Periodicals which developed from this symposium - on the theme of "Networks and the Nineteenth-Century Periodical" - appeared in 2013. More information about this phase of the project can be found here: http://knowledgenetworks.wordpress.com/cfp/. In 2018, along with my colleague Graham Thompson, I organized a related symposium entitled "Content Stinks! The Forms, Materials, and Institutions of American Periodicals" - details of which can be found here: https://periodicalstudies.wordpress.com/2018/06/.

In addition to my ongoing book projects I have also published a wide range of journal articles and book chapters on topics such as: the political thought of African Americans in the eighteenth century; science and its cultural reception during the post-Revolutionary period; transatlantic cultural relations and the idea of the picturesque in the early nineteenth century; the representation of Anglo-American market relations in the theatre during the Jacksonian era; literary nationalism and the historical romance in the 1820s; Georgic representations of literary labor during the American Renaissance; and the relationship between serial publication and the rise of the American novel. An interest in the remarkable cultural transformations which America underwent from the colonial period to the Civil War continues to mark my research.

SELECTED CONFERENCE PAPERS AND TALKS:

March 2024: "Unexpected Endings: Social Crisis, Form, and the Antebellum Fragment," C19: Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Conference, Pasadena.

March 2024: "Posthumous Fragments and the Editing of the Authorial Corpus in Early Nineteenth Century America," Unfolding Editorship Seminar, C19: Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Conference, Pasadena.

March 2024: "Speaking in Ancient Tongues: Historical Conjecture and the Early American Fragment," Voices and Agencies: America and the Atlantic, 1600-1865, Essen.

December 2023: "Nathaniel Hawthorne, Contemporaneous Literary Fragments, and the Waste of Textual Overproduction." Refuse/Refusal: Fifth Biennial Conference of the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, University of Bristol.

June 2023: "When Was the First American Novel? Temporal Anachronism and the Long, Late Publication of William Williams's Mr. Penrose (1776/1815/1969)." Society of Early Americanists Biennial Conference, University of Maryland.

March 2022: "When Was the First American Novel? Temporal Anachronism and the Long, Late Publication of William Williams's Mr. Penrose (1776/1815/1969)." C19: Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Conference, Miami.

February 2022 (invited): "Nobody's Talkin' At Me: Fictionality and the Servant's Voice in Early American Literature." Voices and Agencies: America and the Atlantic, 1600-1865, JFK Institute, Berlin.

October 2021: "A Recipe for Disaster: Social Crisis, Form, and the Early American Fragment." Past Futures: Thinking in Crisis, Thirteenth Biennial Conference of the Charles Brockden Brown Society, Brown University.

March 2021: "X Marks the Spot: Charles Brockden Brown's Monthly Magazine and Periodical Publication." Society of Early Americanists Biennial Conference.

December 2019: "What is an Instalment? Narrative Scales and the Nineteenth-Century Periodical," Scaling the Nineteenth Century, Fourth Biennial Conference of the British Assocation of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, University of Nottingham/Nottingham Trent University.

October 2019: "Arthur Mervyn's Closet: or, Charles Brockden Brown's Servant Problem, and Ours," Dissent of the Governed: C18 to C21, Twelfth Biennial Conference of the Charles Brockden Brown Society, University of Kentucky

September 2019: "Seriality, Serialization, Series: Textual Temporalities and the Gendering of Post-Revolutionary American Fiction," Serial Gendered Subjects: Periodicals Identities, Communities, Northumbria University.

March 2019: "Serial Poetics, American Periodical Culture, and the Problem of the Picaresque," Society of Early Americanists Biennial Conference, Eugene, Oregon.

May 2018 (invited): "Suspense/Desire/Repetition: Serial Poetics and the Early American Novel," Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies, Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz.

May 2018: "'An Executioner in the Civil State': Periodical Culture and the Reimagining of Social Authority in Jeffersonian America," American Counter/Publics - Annual Meeting of the German Association for American Studies, Berlin.

March 2018: "Going Postal: Distribution Networks and the Form of the Nineteenth Century Magazine," Climate - Fifth Biennial Conference of the Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, Albuquerque, New Mexico.

November 2017: "When Was the First American Novel?: Belatedness, Anachronism, and the Long Publication of William Williams's Mr. Penrose (1776/1815/1966)," The 'Not Yet' of the Nineteenth Century - Third Biennial Symposium of the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, University of Exeter.

October 2017: "Portrait Miniatures: Physiognomy, Providence, and the Transatlantic Circulation of Wealth in the Post-1800 American Novel," Migration, Diaspora, Circulation and Translation - Eleventh Biennial Conference of the Charles Brockden Brown Society, University College Dublin.

September 2017: "Early American Periodical Culture and the Problem of the Picaresque," Magazines on the Move - Network of American Periodical Studies Symposium, Nottingham Trent University.

June 2017: "Dead Letters! Does it Not Sound Like Dead Networks? or, Bartleby the Scrivener: A Tale of the Post Office," Melville's Crossings - Eleventh International Melville Conference, King's College London.

April 2017: "The Detective in the Dead Letter Office: Legal Surveillance and the Nineteenth-Century Communications Network," British Association for American Studies Annual Conference, Canterbury Christ Church University.

March 2017: "Seriality, Serialization, Series: Textual Temporalities and the Legitimation of Post-Revolutionary American Fiction," Society of Early Americanists Biennial Conference, Tulsa, Oklahoma.

March 2017 (respondent): "Beyond Allegories of Nation: Early American Novels as Indices of Political Possibility," Society of Early Americanists Biennial Conference, Tulsa, Oklahoma.

May 2016: "What, When and Where Was the First American Novel?" Unpublished America Symposium, University of Birmingham.

December 2015: "Going Postal: Distribution Networks and the Form of the Nineteenth Century Magazine." American into Periodical Studies - Network of American Periodical Studies Symposium, British Library.

November 2015: "'Dead Letters! Does it Not Sound Like Dead Networks?': Bartleby the Postman." Keywords - Second Biennial Conference of the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, University of Warwick.

October 2015: "Electric Eels and the Penurious Gentry: Native Americans, Natural Philosophy, and the Making of Middle-Class Identity in Edward Bancroft's The History of Charles Wentworth." Recording Nature in the Early Atlantic World, 1750-1830 - Tenth Biennial Conference of the Charles Brockden Brown Society - Ybor City, Tampa, Florida

September 2015: "Becoming Proletarian: William Moraley's Unaccountable Self." British Group of Early American Historians Annual Conference, University of Sheffield.

August 2015 (invited): "Transportation Stories: Servants, Convicts, and Class Formation in the Literature of Colonial America." Eccles Centre Summer Scholars Series, British Library.

April 2015 (invited): "A Vast Collection of Particular Truths: Thomas Dobson, Encyclopaedic Knowledge and Information Overload in Post-Revolutionary America." Olin Library, Rollins College, Florida.

April 2014: "Going Postal: Distribution Networks and the Form of the Nineteenth Century Magazine." British Association for American Studies Annual Conference, University of Birmingham.

July 2013: "Before America's First Fictions: English Imports, Periodical Culture, and the Colonial Rise of the Novel." Roots, Routes, and Routs: American and British Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century, University of Plymouth.

March 2013: "Parabolic Social Mobility and the Circulation of Wealth in the Post-1800 American Novel." Society of Early Americanists Biennial Conference, Savannah, Georgia.

April 2012: "The Early American Novel in Fragments: Speculative Reading and Serial Fiction in the Late Eighteenth Century." Speculations: Aesthetics, Risk, and Capital in the Circum-Atlantic World - Eighth Biennial Conference of the Charles Brockden Brown Society, CUNY Graduate Center, New York.

April 2012: "Temporality and the Serial Novel." C19: Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Conference, Berkeley, California.

March 2011: "The Early American Novel in Fragments: Seriality and the Making of Late Eighteenth-Century Fiction." Society of Early Americanists Biennial Conference, Philadelphia.

May 2010: "An Executioner in the Civil State: Periodical Culture and the Reimagining of Social Authority in Jeffersonian America." C19: Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Conference, Penn State University and Research Society for American Periodicals Panel at the American Literature Association Conference, San Francisco.

March 2010 (invited): "A Peculiar Craft: The Problem of Social Knowledge in Late Eighteenth-Century America." American History Research Seminar, Cambridge University and Critical MASS: Manchester American Studies Seminar, University of Manchester.

July 2009: "Before America's First Fictions: English Imports, Periodical Culture, and the Colonial Rise of the Novel." Narrative Dominions: on Writing the History of the Novel in English, Institute of English Studies, University of London.

May 2009: "Globalizing the Republic of Letters: Language, Provincialism, and American Print Culture at the End of the Eighteenth Century." Society of Early Americanists Panel at the American Literature Association Conference, Boston.

June 2008: "'A Vast Collection of Particular Truths': Encyclopaedic Knowledge and Information Overload in Post-Revolutionary American Print Culture." Bibliographical Society of America Panel at the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing Conference, Oxford Brookes University.

March 2008: "The Empire of Letters: Native American Culture and the Diffusion of Knowledge in Late Eighteenth-Century America." British Association for American Studies Annual Conference, University of Edinburgh.

May 2007: "A Silent History: Notes toward a Reconstruction of the Colonial American Theatre." Southwest American Studies Forum, University of Exeter.

April 2006: "'That Grub-Street Sect': Partisan Politics and the Franklinian Image, 1790 - 1808." British Association for American Studies Annual Conference, University of Kent, Canterbury.

April 2005: "Legal Fictions: Charles Brockden Brown and the Emergence of Literary Discourse in Eighteenth-Century America." British Association for American Studies Annual Conference, University of Cambridge.

CONFERENCE ORGANIZATION

2023: Crime, Justice, and Cultures of Transgression in Early America: The 14th Biennial Conference of the Charles Brockden Brown Society, University of Nottingham.

2022: Opening Up, Fifth Biennial Conference of the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, King's College London (co-organized with the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists).

2019: Scaling the Nineteenth Century, Fourth Biennial Conference of the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, University of Nottingham/Nottingham Trent University (co-organized with Stephanie Palmer).

2019: Dissent of the Governed: C18 to C21, Twelfth Biennial Conference of the Charles Brockden Brown Society, University of Kentucky (co-organized with the Charles Brockden Brown Society).

2018: Content Stinks! The Forms, Materials, and Institutions of American Periodicals, University of Nottingham (co-organized with Graham Thompson).

2017: The 'Not Yet' of the Nineteenth Century, Third Biennial Conference of the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, University of Exeter (co-organized with the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists).

2011: Knowledge Networks: American Periodicals, Print Cultures, and Communities, University of Nottingham (co-organized with John Fagg and Robin Vandome).

In my role as Conference Coordinator for the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists I also organized more than twenty BrANCA-sponsored panels at the annual British Association for American Studies conference between 2017 and 2022.

AWARDS AND HONOURS

2021-23: President of the Charles Brockden Brown Society

2017-21: Elected Member of Steering Committee of the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists

2017-21: Elected Member of the Advisory Board of the Charles Brockden Brown Society

2020: Society of Early Americanists Scholar of the Month

2015: Thomas P. Johnson Distinguished Visiting Scholar, Rollins College, Florida

2014-15: Eccles Centre Fellowship, British Library

2010-11: Early Career Research and Knowledge Transfer Grant, University of Nottingham.

2010: Overseas Conference Grant, British Academy.

2007: Barra International Fellowship, The Library Company of Philadelphia.

2006: Benjamin Franklin Fellowship, British Association for American Studies/US Embassy.

2005: Research Fellowship, JFK Insititute for North American Studies, Berlin.

2000-03: Postgraduate Research Degree Studentship, Arts and Humanities Research Council.

1999-2000: Postgraduate Taught Degree Studentship, Arts and Humanities Research Council.

ACADEMIC SERVICE

Reviewer of book and article manuscripts for: Oxford University Press; Cambridge University Press; Broadview Press; University of Wales Press; Early American Literature; Studies in American Fiction; Journal of American Studies; Journal of Early American History; Eighteenth-Century Studies; Journal of Social History; Literature and History; Religions; The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation; Papers on Language and Literature; English: Journal of the English Association; Huntington Library Quarterly.

Tenure/promotion panel evaluations for: University of Kent; Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Future Research

I am interested in addressing the conceptualization, dissemination and contestation of "the novel" in colonial America in future work, drawing on both established transatlantic methodologies and emerging work on the idea of "fictionality" in order to make a case for the significant pre-history to our familiar narratives of the post-revolutionary "rise of the American novel." I have very briefly sketched out some of the parameters for this project in a contribution to a roundtable on "21st Century Studies in the Early American Novel" that I edited for the Journal of American Studies, and that also included pieces by Duncan Faherty, Thomas Koenigs, Karen Weyler, Ed White, Sian Silyn Roberts and Cathy N. Davidson. In addition, I have co-edited (with Thomas Koenigs) a special issue of Early American Literature - 56.3 (2021) - on the topic of fictionality that reflects some of the trends and approaches I am interested in developing here. A podcast for Early American Literature in which we discuss the conception and goals of this special issue can be found here: https://eal.uky.edu/podcast

  • PETHERS, MATTHEW, 2025. Encyclopaedias, Information Overload, and the Intellectual Division of Labor in Early America Early American Studies. (In Press.)
  • PETHERS, MATTHEW, 2024. A Periodical Masquerade: The History of the Book in Nineteenth-Century America, Unbound. In: RUSS CASTRONOVO and ROBERT LEVINE, eds., The New Nineteenth Century American Literary Studies Cambridge University Press. (In Press.)
  • PETHERS, MATTHEW and COUCH, DANIEL DIEZ, eds., 2024. The Part and the Whole in Early American Literature, Print Culture, and Art Bucknell University Press. (In Press.)
  • PETHERS, MATTHEW and COUCH, DANIEL DIEZ, 2024. Parting with Wholes in Early American Literature, Print Culture, and Art. In: MATTHEW PETHERS and DANIEL DIEZ COUCH, eds., The Part and the Whole in Early American Literature, Print Culture, and Art Bucknell University Press. (In Press.)
  • PETHERS, MATTHEW, 2024. William Williams, Anachronism, and the Temporal Logic of Textual Recovery (1776/1815/1969) American Literary History. 36(1), 16-50
  • PETHERS, MATTHEW, 2023. The Face of Poverty: Physiognomics, Social Mobility, and the Politics of Recognition in the Early Nineteenth-Century American Novel J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. 11(1), 91-119
  • PETHERS, MATTHEW, 2022. Serialization and the Narrative Scales of the Literary Magazine. In: LANZENDOERFER, TIM, ed., The Routledge Companion to the British and North American Literary Magazine Routledge. 45-58
  • PETHERS, MATTHEW and VON MORZE, LEN, 2022. Periodical Queries: Early American Magazine Writing in and out of the Charles Brockden Brown Canon Early American Literature. 57(2), 555-62
  • PETHERS, MATTHEW and KOENIGS, THOMAS, 2021. Early American Fictionality Early American Literature. 56(3), 669-98
  • PETHERS, MATTHEW, 2021. The Periodical Text-Network, Serialized Genres, and the Making of 'Literature' in Nineteenth Century America Nineteenth Century Studies. 33(1), 19-45 (In Press.)
  • PETHERS, M., 2017. Transportation Narratives: Servants, Convicts, and the Literature of Colonization in British America. In: PAUL LAUTER and NICHOLAS COLES, eds., The History of American-Working Class Literature Cambridge University Press. 7-24
  • PETHERS, M., 2016. Dead Letters and the Secret Life of the State in Nineteenth Century America. In: BERNIER, C. M., NEWMAN, J. and PETHERS, M., eds., The Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing Edinburgh University Press. 136-51
  • PETHERS, M., BERNIER, C. and NEWMAN, J., eds., 2016. The Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing Edinburgh University Press.
  • PETHERS, M., BERNIER, C. M. and NEWMAN, J., 2016. Introduction: Epistolary Studies and Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing. In: PETHERS, M., BERNIER, C. M. and NEWMAN, J., eds., The Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing Edinburgh University Press. 11-28
  • PETHERS, M., FAHERTY, D., KOENIGS, T., WEYLER, K., WHITE, E., SILYN ROBERTS, S. and DAVIDSON, C. N., 2016. 21st Century Studies in the Early American Novel Journal of American Studies. 50(3), 779-824
  • PETHERS, M., 2014. The Secret Witness: Thinking, and Not Thinking, About Servants in the Early American Novel. In: ANDREW LAWSON, ed., Created Unequal: Class and the Making of American Literature Routledge. 40-55
  • PETHERS, M., 2014. The Early American Novel in Fragments: Reading and Writing Serial Fiction in the Post-Revolutionary United States. In: PATRICK PARRINDER, ANDREW NASH and NICOLA WILSON, eds., New Directions in the History of the Novel Palgrave Macmillan. 63-75
  • PETHERS, M., 2013. 'That eternal ghost of trade': Anglo-American market culture and the antebellum stage Yankee. In: PEEL, R. and MAUDLIN, D., eds., The materials of exchange between Britain and north east America, 1750-1900 Ashgate. 83-115
  • FAGG, J., PETHERS, M and VANDOME, R., 2013. "Introduction: Networks and the Nineteenth-Century Periodical" American Periodicals. 23(2), 93-104
  • PETHERS, M., FAGG, J. and VANDOME, R., eds., 2013. Networks and the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Special Issue of "American Periodicals" - 23 (2)
  • PETHERS, M., 2012. "I must resemble nobody": John Neal, genre, and the making of American literary nationalism. In: WATTS, E. and CARLSON, D.J., eds., John Neal and nineteenth-century American literature and culture Bucknell University Press. 1-38
  • PETHERS, M., ROUND, P. H., THOMPSON, G., FAGG, J. and BRIER, E., 2012. Online Roundtable: A History of the Book in America Journal of American Studies. 14(2), E22
  • PETHERS, M., 2009. "This small Herculean labor": literary professionalism, georgic work, and Walden Amerikastudien/American Studies. 54(2), 165-194
  • PETHERS, M., 2005. Transatlantic Migration and the Politics of the Picturesque in Washington Irving's 'Sketch Book' Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations. 9(2), 135-58

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