MATTHEW MULLINS
Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary
P.O. Box 1889
Wake Forest, NC 27588
919-523-8382 (cell)
919-761-2292 (office)
[email protected]
EDUCATION
Ph.D. English, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, August 2012
Dissertation: Postmodern Materialism: Things, People, and the Remaking of the Social in Contemporary American
Narrative. Chair: Christian Moraru. Readers: Mark Rifkin & Stephen R. Yarbrough.
M.A. English, North Carolina State University, May 2007
B.A. History of Ideas and Biblical Studies, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, May 2005
PROFESSIONAL APPOINTMENTS
Assistant Professor of English & History of Ideas, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2012-
RESEARCH & TEACHING INTERESTS
Ethnic literatures of the U.S., postmodernism, globalization, Critical Race Theory, rhetorical theory.
PUBLICATIONS
Peer Reviewed Journal Articles
“Material Foundations: Retheorizing Native Writing and Social Construction in Leslie Marmon Silko’s
Ceremony.” Arizona Quarterly. Forthcoming.
“Antagonized by the Text, Or, It Takes Two to Read Alice Walker’s ‘Everyday Use.’” The Comparatist 37
(May 2013): 37-53.
“Hunger and the Apocalypse of Modernity in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.” symplokē: A Journal for the
Intermingling of Literary, Cultural, and Theoretical Scholarship 19.1-2 (2011): 75-93.
“Objects and Outliers: Narrative Community in Don DeLillo’s Underworld.” Critique: Studies in
Contemporary Fiction 51.3 (Spring 2010): 276-292.
“Boroughs and Neighbors: Traumatic Solidarity in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly
Close.” Papers on Language and Literature 45.3 (Summer 2009): 298-324.
Book in Progress
Postmodernism in Pieces: Materializing the Social in U.S. Fiction, 1960-2010.
In the last two decades postmodernism has collapsed under the weight of the very phenomena it set out to
deconstruct: language, whiteness, masculinity, class, the academy. Recasting these categories as social constructs
has done little to alleviate their material effects. Yet postmodernism’s apparent failures on this front also serve as
a call to which new materialist theories of literature and culture have begun to respond. Postmodernism in Pieces:
Materializing the Social in U.S. Fiction, 1960-2010 reexamines the critical orthodoxies of postmodernism in light of
these new materialisms, and argues that fiction of the last fifty years represents social categories not as myths in
need of demystification but as products of material processes. What makes fiction postmodern is ultimately its
refusal to accept “social” explanations for problems facing a given culture, and its tendency instead to examine
everyday things and people as constituent pieces of larger social categories. Analyzing a diverse range of fiction by
writers such as Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Leslie Silko, and Julia Alvarez, I reassemble postmodernism piece by
piece as a resolutely materialist aesthetic.
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Articles in Progress
“Cosmological Revolutions in Don DeLillo’s Short Fiction.” Under review.
“Counter-Counterstories: Critical Race Theory and Percival Everett’s Assumption.”
Reviews
Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing, by Ian Bogost, in SubStance (Forthcoming).
Material Difference: Modernism and Allegories of Discourse, by William Melaney, in symplokē (Forthcoming).
Post-Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Just-In-Time Capitalism, by Jeffrey Nealon, in American Book Review
34.4 (May/June 2013): 13.
Fetishism and Its Discontents in Post-1960 American Fiction, by Christopher Kocela, in South Atlantic Review
76.3 (2011):
Séance: Poems, by Janice Moore Fuller, in International Poetry Review 34.2 (Fall 2007): 109-111.
AWARDS
Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award. UNCG College of Arts and Sciences, 2011-2012.
Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award. UNCG English Department, 2011-2012.
UNCG Summer Research Award, 2010 & 2011
Graduate Student Association Travel Award UNCG, 2010 & 2011
CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS
“Backward-Looking Futures: Horizons of Change in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.” American
Literature Association. Washington, D.C., May 2014.
“Idealism and Materialism: Approaches to U.S. hegemony in Teju Cole’s Open City.” American
Comparative Literature Association. New York, March 2014.
“Material Jazz: Reconstructing the Social in Toni Morrison’s Jazz.” Society for Comparative Literature
and the Arts. Greensboro, October 2013.
“What the Hell is Water, LBJ?: Pedagogical Empathy in the Short Fiction of David Foster Wallace.”
American Literature Association. Boston, May 2013.
“The Collapse of Otherness: Julia Alvarez’s Remaking of the Social.” American Comparative Literature
Association. Providence, March 2012.
“DeLillo’s Uncollected Short Fiction.” American Literature Association. Boston, May 2011.
“Who Is My Neighbor?: Theory, Theology & Community in the 21st Century.” American Comparative
Literature Association. New Orleans, April 2010.
“Narrative and Community in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake.” Louisville Conference on Literature and
Culture Since 1900. Louisville, February 2010.
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“Counternarratives: Benjamin and the Reproduction of Terror in DeLillo’s White Noise and Falling
Man.” American Comparative Literature Association. Cambridge, March 2009.
“Children of Terror: Elementary Performances of Terror in DeLillo Before and After 9/11.” Louisville
Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900. Louisville, February 2009.
“Boroughs and Neighbors: Traumatic Solidarity in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly
Close.” American Literature Association Symposium on Fiction. Savannah GA, October 2008.
“Death Angel Samaritan: Unlikely Passage in Bernard Malamud’s ‘Idiots First.’” College English
Association. St. Louis, March 2008.
“Appropriating 19th Century Narrative: Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada and the Slave Narrative
Tradition.” Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900. Louisville, February 2008.
“Textual Structure and the African Diaspora in Caryl Phillips’s The Atlantic Sound.” College English
Association. New Orleans, April 2007.
TEACHING EXPERIENCE
Assistant Professor (2012-present), Adjunct (2007-2012), Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary
Multiethnic Literature of the United States
Contemporary American Novels
Modern American Poetry
American Romanticism
Survey of American Literature-Exploration to Present
Senior Colloquium: History of Ideas (Directed senior thesis projects)
History of Ideas I
English Composition II
English Composition I
Teaching Assistant and Instructor of Record (2008-2012), University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Topics in American Literature: “Introduction to Postmodernism”
Introduction to Narrative
Introduction to Literature
English Composition II—Speaking Intensive
English Composition I
INVITED PRESENTATIONS
“Postwhat?!: Literature and Representation After 9/11.” Core Lecture Series. Ashby Residential College,
University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2011.
“Understanding the Profession and Applying to Ph.D. Programs.” Writing Into the Profession Graduate
Student Conference, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2009, 2010, 2011.
ADMINISTRATIVE EXPERIENCE
Degree Program Coordinator, English, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, Spring 2013-present
Organize and direct English degree program assessment; developed common core Student Learning
Outcomes for literature survey courses.
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Assistant Director of the Writing Center, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, Fall 2012-present
SERVICE
Professional
Panel Organizer and Chair, “When Postmodernism Becomes History,” ALA Conference, May 2013.
Assistant/Associate Editor, International Poetry Review, 2007–2011
Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary
Chair, Baccalaureate Colloquium Committee, 2013-2014
Reader, Baccalaureate Colloquium Committee, 2012-2013
Faculty Jury Reader, General Education Program Assessment and English Degree Program Assessment,
2012-2013, 2013-2014
Adjunct Faculty Representative, English Degree Program Assessment, 2011-2012
English Department, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Conference Organizer, “Writing Into the Profession Graduate Student Conference,” 2008
Session Leader, Graduate Student Orientation, 2010
Contributor, Technê Rhêtorikê, Writing Program textbook published by Hayden-McNeil, 2009, 2010
PROFESSIONAL MEMBERSHIPS
Modern Language Association
American Comparative Literature Association
Society for Contemporary Literature
Society for Comparative Literature and the Arts
The Don DeLillo Society
REFERENCES
Christian Moraru, Professor of English
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
1111 Spring Garden Street
Greensboro, NC 27412
(336) 334-5384
[email protected]
Michael Travers, Professor of English
Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary
P.O. Box 1889
Wake Forest, NC 27588
(919) 671-1615
[email protected]
Mark Rifkin, Associate Professor of English
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
1111 Spring Garden Street
Greensboro, NC 27412
(336) 334-5311
[email protected]
Mary Holland, Associate Professor of English
SUNY New Paltz
600 Hawk Dr.
New Paltz, New York 12561
(845) 242-7429
[email protected]
Stephen R. Yarbrough, Professor of English
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
1111 Spring Garden Street
Greensboro, NC 27412
(336) 334-3282
[email protected]
Sheila Smith McKoy, Associate Professor of English
Director, African American Cultural Center
North Carolina State University
Campus Box 8105
Raleigh, NC 27695-8105
(919) 513-2446
[email protected]