About Me

Matthew Ellis is a writer, researcher, and artist based out of Portland, Oregon. Currently, he teaches film and media studies at Portland State University, and co-hosts the weekly cinema series, The Pacific Northwest Insurance Corporation Moviefilm Podcast. Matthew also writes and performs music for A Hope For Home, formerly a Facedown Records/Sony Music affiliate, and teaches a number of online courses on film and media history for Cinejourneys. His writing has appeared in publications such as Jump Cut, Parapraxis, and Jewish Currents, and he publishes a newsletter on Substack titled Histories of the Present. He is also currently at work on a book project, tentatively titled Against the History Machine: American Culture After Accumulation, focused on the political economy of twenty-first century artistic production and historical consciousness.

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Matt received his PhD in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University in 2021. Trained in a film and media studies tradition, he received a graduate certificate in Science and Technology Studies, where he studied the history of knowledge and historical periodization focused around the history of capitalism and neoliberal economics. He considers himself a theorist and historian of culture and capitalism, rooted in a Marxist and Foucauldian tradition, with an ever-present tendency to periodize, periodize, periodize (as Fredric Jameson reminds us, "one cannot not periodize.") These days he is at work on a book project on art and capitalist periodization, but his research takes him into directions such as religious studies and the history of Christianity, conservatism and right wing political theory, and forays into music and the history of heavy metal.

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Contact Matt here.