Dr. Josh Matthews

Website: joshmatthews.org

Youtube Channel: Learning About Movies

Josh Matthews teaches early American literature, science fiction, World Literature 1, Intro to Film as Art, Business and Technical Writing, and CORE Composition and Literature classes..

He also co-leads a class on Dante and the Italian Renaissance, which includes a nine-day trip to Florence, Italy.

He has published on the reception of Dante and the Divine Comedy in nineteenth-century America, and on American readings of the Divine Comedy during the Civil War.

He edits the book reviews for Pro Rege, Dordt University's journal of reformed studies. He has also helped edit the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review and the Walt Whitman Archive. He co-leads the annual Great Texts Seminar for Dordt Faculty every spring.

Courses Taught

• American Literature 1 (ENG 201)
• Science Fiction (ENG 223)
• Dante and the Italian Renaissance (CORE 289/HIST 329)
• Intro to Film (CORE 160)
• Philip K. Dick (ENG 343)
• Business and Technical Writing (ENG 305)
• Responding to Literature (CORE 180)
• Rhetoric and the Christian Scholar (KSP 151 -- Honors)
• English Composition (CORE 120)

Institutional History

• Ph.D., English, University of Iowa (2012)
• M.A., English, Kent State University (2005)
• B.A., English, Indiana University (2003)

Academic Publications

• "Towards a Robust and Scholarly Christian Engagement with Science Fiction," Christian Scholar's Review 48 (Summer 2019)
• "Walt Whitman's Vision of the Inferno, or Dante in Drum-Taps," Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 32 (Summer/Fall 2014)
• "The American Alighieri: Receptions of Dante in the United States, 1818-1867" (dissertation, 2012)
• "The Divine Comedy as a Civil War Epic", J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists I (Fall 2013).
• "Peddlers of the Rod: Melville's 'The Lightning-Rod Man' and the Antebellum Periodical Market", Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 12 (October 2010).