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 MUBI’s Notebook, 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 a burgeoning project on music and the history of heavy metal.

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Contact Matt here.