Matthew Moore is a writer, PhD student, and lifelong Midwesterner. Raised in a small, rural town boasting a single two-line highway with no traffic lights to boot, Matthew’s nonfiction writing and research has long explored the ruination of heartland ecologies, the politics of emotion, and the peripheral places of social class. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment in creative nonfiction from Iowa State University. He is currently a PhD student studying American literature at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Matthew’s interest spans postbellum to post-45 workplace fictions encompassing a range of American literary movements and traditions from realism to naturalism to regionalism to modernism. In examining novels across the period, Matthew’s research primarily focuses on representations of anger and anger management, tracing interrelations between literary forms and social formations designed and organized to control and manage unruly emotions boiling over the brim of American business culture. Theorizing a managerial imaginary connecting economy, emotion, and aesthetics, this research thinks how anger, frustration, and wrath speak to key historical junctures in American social, economic, and cultural life from 1850 to 1950: blurring lines between men’s economic work and women’s domestic management; the advent of interracial workplaces; and the increasing commercialization and commodification of literary production itself. From Moby-Dick to The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, from Edith Wharton to Ann Petry, Matthew’s scholarship takes seriously the fact that American economic and literary modernity was all the rage. 

Matthew is also at work on a nonfiction collection of personal prose, auto-ethnography, and literary criticism tentatively titled In Plain Sight: Essays on Pastures, Perception, and Picturing the Midwest. In this collection, he recounts his upbringing in rural Missouri in connection with a range of formative Midwestern regionalist and modernist writers from Hamlin Garland to Sherwood Anderson and Willa Cather. Through meditations on the personal, the historical, and the literary, In Plain Sight speculates on how the topographical flatness of plains, pastures, and prairies effected powerful expressions of human attention to nonhuman ecologies newly reconfigured by, and in turn reconfiguring, emerging infrastructures and economies of rail transport, roadmaking, and industrial agriculture.

His essays and public scholarship can be found in Rust Belt Magazine, The Pittsburgh Review of Books, The Mid-Theory Collective, and InVisible Culture.

Matthew is the convener for the Psychoanalysis Reading Group at WashU.

Find or contact him at mattmo-washu.bsky.social or email m.s.moore@wustl.edu

photography by Micheal Keatley