Rate My Professor Matthew Champion

Associate Professor Matthew Champion serves in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies within the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne. He joined the University in 2022 as Senior Lecturer in History and was subsequently promoted to Associate Professor. Champion earned undergraduate degrees in history, classics, and music from the University of Melbourne in the early 2000s, where he developed his interests under the influence of historians such as Charles Zika. He completed a research MA in Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Melbourne and his PhD at Queen Mary University of London under the supervision of Miri Rubin, focusing on time and temporality in the fifteenth century. His career trajectory includes a Junior Research Fellowship at Queen’s College, Cambridge; a tenured Lectureship in Medieval History at Birkbeck, University of London; a Senior Research Fellowship at the Australian Catholic University; and ARC fellowships in Melbourne starting in 2020.

Champion's research centers on how time was made, perceived, and experienced from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries in medieval and early modern Europe, exploring its intersections with affective dispositions, political commitments, historical processes including temporal modernity, globalisation, racialisation, colonial practices, and mediality. He is Chief Investigator on the ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award project 'The Sounds of Time,' which uses microhistory, global history, sound studies, and sensory approaches to investigate musical clocks and their melodies in ecclesiastical, political, and social contexts. He also contributes as Chief Investigator to the ARC Discovery Project 'Albrecht Dürer’s Material World,' analyzing materiality and time-measuring devices in Dürer’s prints. Champion's monograph The Fullness of Time: Temporalities of the Fifteenth-Century Low Countries (University of Chicago Press, 2017) was awarded the 2018 Gladstone Prize by the Royal Historical Society. Other significant works include the chapter 'Pointing to a Deeper Now: Time, Sound, Touch, and the Devotional Present in Fifteenth-Century Northern Europe' (2022) and the co-authored article 'Musicalising History' with Miranda Stanyon in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. He has held fellowships at the Warburg Institute, Newberry Library, ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, and Sugden Fellowship at Queen’s College, Melbourne.