Mark Alan Mattes

Assistant Professor & Internship Program Director

About

My first book, Handwriting in Early America: A Media History  (University of Massachusetts Press, 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, Archival Apocrypha: Indigenous Writing and the Figure of Logan in Colonial and Native American History, examines how Indigenous and colonial archives shape histories about Native Americans and the Ohio River Valley. Recent writing also appears in journals such as Criticism, Eighteenth-Century Studies, and Ohio Valley History, as well as in collections such as Teaching the History of the Book and Apocalypse in American Literature and Culture. My research has been supported by the Bibliographical Society of America, the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, the Harrison Institute at the University of Virginia, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the American Antiquarian Society, the Newberry Library, the Friends of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries, and the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing.

I regularly teach courses on Text Technologies, Book and Media History, Native American and African American Literature, and Early American Literature. In addition to teaching, I organized a NEH-funded undergraduate workshop, "Print Culture in the Age of Shakespeare," in support of Kentucky’s First Folio! exhibition in 2016. 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 Lousiville Conference on Literature and Culture. I also founded Hot Brown Press, which supports my teaching and takes pro-bono commissions to support cool stuff at UofL and around town.

Here's a thing about trees that I did.

I think this is pretty rad.