Mark Alan Mattes

Assistant Professor & Internship Program Director

About

My first book, Handwriting in Early America: A Media History (UMass 2023), is an edited collection of essays that explores how handwriting has been and remains crucial to our understandings of communication, art, cultural difference, and social order. My current book project, Memories of Soyechtowa, examines how Indigenous histories enact community and homeland caretaking in the Ohio Valley. An article based on this research, "Trees and Texts: Indigenous History, Material Media, and the Logan Elm" (Criticism), won the Society of Early Americanists' Essay Award (2024) & the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association's BIPOC Scholars Award (2024).

I regularly teach courses on Book and Media History, Native American and African American Studies, and Early American Literature, and I am the coordinator of the English Department Internship Program. I organized a NEH-funded undergraduate workshop, "Print Culture in the Age of Shakespeare," in support of Kentucky’s First Folio! exhibition in 2016, and in 2019, I chaired "The Futures of Handwriting," an international symposium sponsored by UofL and the Rare Book School’s Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography, in partnership with The Filson Historical Society. In 2023, I began the American Afterlives panel stream at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture, and I founded Hot Brown Press, which supports cool stuff at UofL and around town.

I think this is pretty rad.