Rate My Professor Neill Matheson

Matheson's research focuses on American Literature, Ecocriticism, Animal Studies, and American Gothic, specializing in nineteenth-century U.S. literature and culture. His scholarly interests include the cultural meanings of emotion, particularly disordered moods and wayward feelings associated with noncompliant subjects in nineteenth-century American fiction. He has published essays on melancholia and queer sensibility in Nathaniel Hawthorne, charm in Henry James, and imitative desire and gender nonconformity in Constance Fenimore Woolson. Matheson's work also examines American writing about nonhuman animals and the more-than-human natural world, including analyses of Thoreau’s Inner Animal in Walden and animal figures and racial environmentalism in Thoreau’s essay “Walking” and Journal. Key publications include "Clifford's Dim, Unsatisfactory Elegance" (2010), "Constance Fenimore Woolson's Anthropology of Desire" (2009), "Allan Melvill's Melancholy: Errant Mourning in Pierre" (2015), and the conference paper "Meat and Light: Animal Energies in 'The Whale as a Dish'" presented at the International Melville Society in 2023. He teaches graduate seminars such as “Strange Ecologies,” which explores environmental approaches to Gothic, weird, and speculative fiction; “Love, Sex, and Friendship,” considering forms of love and intimacy outside conventional nineteenth-century marriage plots; and “American Literature and Animal Studies,” investigating the human-animal distinction and relations with nonhuman animals. Matheson has co-chaired the Environmental Studies Search Committee.