Matthew Helm
Professor Helm is a scholar of twentieth and twenty-first century transnational American literature and culture, specializing in LGBT+ literature, mass media and communication studies, and queer/trans theories. His current book project, titled Transmediations: Queer Literature, Media Technology, and the Archive, is the first sustained study to embed 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 queerness and the affordance of queer socialization, activism, and community from the 1930s to the present day. Matthew’s scholarship has appeared in Religion & Literature, The Nathaniel Hawthorn Review, and Studies in the Novel.
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. At this time, he offers courses about gender and the Gothic for the General Education Literature program. In addition, he teaches “Reading and Writing About the Short Story” for English majors. In 2022-2023, Matthew served as a Graduate Teaching and Research Fellow in the American Studies department at TU Dortmund in Germany, where he taught undergraduate and graduate classes of his own design.
In addition to his work as a scholar and teacher, Matthew is also a proponent of bringing the conversations within the academy to broader publics via community engagement, public humanities, and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. In the summer of 2020, Matthew 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 book about food history and culture along the Iowa Valley Scenic Byway.