Fields: Film Studies; Media Studies; Critical Theory; 20th-and-21st-Century Art, Literature and Culture; History of Capitalism; Philosophy of History; Political Theory
Biography:
Matthew Ellis is a writer, researcher, and artist based out of Portland, Oregon. At Portland State, he is Adjunct Assistant Professor of English, where he has been teaching in the English department in various roles since 2023. His research and teaching center on the history of art, media, and popular culture in the United States alongside recent developments in the study of the history of capitalism.
He is currently at work on a book project tentatively titled Against the History Machine: American Culture After Accumulation, which focuses on the political economy of twenty-first-century aesthetic production and digital technology, discourses around so-called Artificial Intelligence, and the changing nature of historical consciousness that follows from both. His academic essays on film theory and history have appeared in publications such as Jump Cut, Parapraxis, and a number of edited book collections, while his public writing can be found in outlets ranging from MUBI’s Notebook and Jewish Currents to Boston Review (forthcoming).
In addition to his scholarly work, Matt is the co-host of the weekly cinema podcast The Pacific Northwest Insurance Corporation Moviefilm Podcast, a musician in A Hope For Home (formerly Facedown Records), and works within the Portland film exhibition world, including stints at 5th Avenue Cinema (as a former PSU student!), The Northwest Film Center, Cinema 21, and currently as a member of the Portland Critics Association. Outside of Portland State he teaches online courses on film history for Cinejourneys, and publishes a newsletter titled Histories of the Present.
At PSU:
Matt’s courses in the PSU English Department are designed to introduce students to a set of scholarly methods drawn from overlapping traditions of 20th century critical theory, art history, and political economy, with the ultimate goal of learning to use these methods for the understanding of our own unfolding present. They often begin by taking a contemporary area of concern—the fate of cinema in a digitizing world, the proliferation of internet conspiracy theories, the centrality of nostalgia in popular culture—and then proceed to trace the genealogy of their emergences within wider historical processes and intellectual history.
As such, students can expect to encounter texts from multiple disciplines and theoretical approaches in his courses, but always with the purpose of giving students new tools to think as opposed to merely testing for mastery or expecting expertise.
Among others, his course offerings at Portland State include:
- Critical Theory of Cinema
- History of Cinema and Narrative Media (I, II)
- Futures of Nostalgia
- Post-Cinema
- The Conspiracy Theory
- Apocalypse Cinema
- Representing Time
Selected Writing:
- “Index’s Limit,” in Parapraxis 4, Summer 2024
- “Whatever Happened to Marxist Film Theory?,” in Jump Cut 61, 2022
- “Film, Television, Streaming and ‘Plots’ Against Late Liberalism,” for Frontiers of American Reaction (George Washington University’s Illiberalism Studies Program), February 2025
- “Is It Happening Again? Twin Peaks and ‘The Return’ of History,” with Tyler Theus, in Critical Essays on Twin Peaks: The Return, Antonio Sanna, ed. Palgrave, 2019