Matthew Helm
Office Hours
Monday, Wednesday and Friday: 1:25-2:25 pm and by appointment.
Get to know Matthew
Professor Helm is a scholar of twentieth and twenty-first century transnational American literature and culture, specializing in LGBT+ studies, mass media and communication studies, and queer/trans theories. His work-in-progress book project, titled Transmediations: Media Materialism in the Archives of Queer Literature, embeds literature by LGBT-identified authors within a history of media evolutions and concurrent queer revolutions, examining the central role of media technology in the making of queer identities and activism. Matthew’s scholarship has appeared in The Nathaniel Hawthorn Review, Religion & Literature, Studies in the Novel, and differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies.
As the recipient of the Certificate in College Teaching from the University of Iowa’s College of Education, Matthew is as passionate about pedagogy as he is research. Currently, he offers courses about “gender and the gothic” and “the literary journey” for the General Education Literature program. In 2022-2023, Matthew served as a Graduate Teaching and Research Fellow in the American Studies department at TU Dortmund in Germany, teaching undergraduate and graduate classes of his own design.
In addition to his work as a scholar and teacher, Matthew is a proponent of bringing the conversations within the academy to the broader public. In the summer of 2020, he was selected for an internship with the Humanities for the Public Good Initiative through the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, where he worked with Iowa Valley Resource Conservation & Development to produce a booklet about food history and culture along the Iowa Valley Scenic Byway.
