Matthew Cordova Frankel

Assistant Professor of English
Co-Director, Rumowicz Literature of the Sea Lecture/Seminar Series
Undergraduate Academic Advisor

Ph.D. Northwestern University
B.A. State University of New York at Albany

Office: 108 Independence Hall
Phone: 401-874-4683
E-Mail: matt@uri.edu
Office Hours: Tue 2:00 - 3:00 pm and 5:00 - 6:00 pm

Professor Frankel joined the English department at the University of Rhode Island in 2003. Before happily returning east (he was born and raised in NYC), Frankel taught for two years at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois where he offered courses in all periods of American literature and culture, as well as in contemporary critical theory. These courses included "Criticizing American Puritanism," "Reason and its Discontents in the American Enlightenment," The Philosophy and Politics of New England Transcendentalism," "The Imagination of Herman Melville," "Narrative and Memory in American Modernism," "Marxism and Poetics," "Secrets and Lies: Racial Ideology and Literary Representation in the American Novel," as well as "Understanding the Poststructuralist Turn."

While at Northwestern, Frankel received a Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences Award for Teaching Excellence, as well as the Hagstrum Prize for his dissertation, "An Aesthetics of Citizenship: Race, Representation, and the American Sublime." Chosen by Routledge Press for its Outstanding Dissertation series, Frankel has decided to turn the manuscript into a book-length project which will expand his study of the sublime experience in late 18th-and 19th-century American literary and political culture. Sections of the work have already appeared in American Literature. Frankel also teaches and writes about the institutional history of American literary criticism; he has taught a graduate course on the critical legacy of F.O. Matthiessen called "The American Renaissance Revisited: A Study in Canon Formation" and plans to complete a cultural biography of American intellectual historian Perry Miller, tentatively titled The Life and the Mind.

At the University of Rhode Island Frankel directs the Edmund Rumowicz Literature of the Sea Seminar/Lecture Series, an interdisciplinary program which explores current intellectual fault lines between the humanities and the hard sciences within the subject of maritime studies. He also serves on the editorial board of ATQ: A Journal of Nineteenth Century American Literature and Culture.