Faculty Profile

Dr. Neill Matheson

Associate Professor of English, American Literature

Years of Service at UT Arlington

  • Associate Professor of English, (2010-present)
  • Assistant Professor of English, (2003-2010)

Education

  • Ph.D, Johns Hopkins University, 1995
  • M.A., Johns Hopkins University, 1987
  • B.A., Reed College, 1983

Current Research

Research and teaching interests include nineteenth-century American literature and culture; gender and sexuality; literature and psychology; American Gothic; and critical and cultural theory. He is working on a book on American fiction from Hawthorne to James, which explores the social meanings attached to wayward moods and attention disorders, investigating aspects of emotional life that help to define improper gender identities, heterodox beliefs, and bad subjects in nineteenth-century America. Other current research focuses on Thoreau’s ideas about human animality in Walden, and, more generally, changing definitions of the human in relation to species difference and non-human nature in early America.

Recent Publications

  • "Thoreau’s Inner Animal: Male Purity and Brute Neighbors," forthcoming in Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literatures, Culture, and Theory.
  • "Clifford’s Dim, Unsatisfactory Elegance,” forthcoming in The Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, Fall 2010.
  • "History and Survival: Charles Chesnutt and the Time of Conjure," American Literary Realism 43:1 (2010), 1-22.
  • "Woolson’s Anthropology of Desire,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 26:1 (2009), 48-68.
  • Walden, Civil Disobedience, and Other Writings. Ed. William Rossi. Third Norton Critical Edition. New York: Norton, 2008.
  • "Intimacy and Form: James on Hawthorne’s Charm.” The Henry James Review 28 (2007): 120-139.
  • "Melancholy History in The House of the Seven Gables.” Literature and Psychology 48 (2002): 1-37.
  • "Thoreau's Gramática Parda: Conjugating Race and Nature." Arizona Quarterly 57 (2001): 1-43. Reprinted in: Thoreau, Henry David.
  • "Talking Horrors: James, Euphemism, and the Specter of Wilde." American Literature 71 (1999): 709-50.