Matt Seybold

mseybold @ elmira . edu

Matt Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature & Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, as well as Resident Scholar at the Center For Mark Twain Studies. He is also the founding director of the Media Studies, Communications, & Design program at Elmira College, executive producer and host of The American Vandal Podcast, and founding editor of MarkTwainStudies.org. He is co-editor (with Michelle Chihara) of The Routledge Companion to Literature & Economics (2018) and (with Gordon Hutner) of a 2019 special issue of American Literary History on “Economics & Literary Studies in The New Gilded Age.” His work has appeared in dozens of publications.

Dr. Seybold received his PhD from University of California, Irvine in 2012. His dissertation focuses on the origins of the confidence-man archetype in the transbellum US periodical press and its enduring association with organized finance, especially during periods of economic crisis (see “Confidence Tricks” in Aeon). This research connected him with a community of scholars emerging during the global meltdown of the late 2000s, all of whom were doing cross-disciplinary research connecting literary, cultural, and media studies to economics and finance. The Routledge Companion to Literature & Economics was the first text to survey and codify this subfield, which remains central to Dr. Seybold’s critical and pedagogical commitments.

After a brief stint at University of Alabama, Dr. Seybold came to Elmira College in 2015, where he was immediately tasked with creating digital programming for the Center For Mark Twain Studies which would make the Cultural Humanities Site more visible beyond the small community of professional Twain scholars. In 2016, he led the launch of MarkTwainStudies.org, a multimedia hub for scholars, students, teachers, journalists, and others interested in Twain’s life, work, legacy, and world. The site has since welcomed millions of visitors and been cited by the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, and countless other mainstream, academic, and niche publications. It houses hundreds of recorded lectures dating back to the 1980s, interactive maps and tours, and digital editions of obscure or inaccessible Twain-related works edited and annotated by Dr. Seybold.

In addition to the website, Dr. Seybold liasons with visiting Twain scholars, co-leads the CMTS Summer Teachers Institute, serves on the editorial board of the Mark Twain Annual, and produces The American Vandal. Launched during the pandemic in 2020, the podcast initially served as a substitute for CMTS’s in-person programming, but has since evolved into a succession of miniseries on topics related not only to Twain Studies, but US history, literary theory, and media studies. With thousands of regular listeners, it features guests from a wide range of scholarly backgrounds, and gently argues for Twain’s ongoing relevance to a broad array of fields and disciplines.

Simultaneously, Dr. Seybold continues to research and publish in Literature & Economics, on topics like John Maynard Keynes’s cultural criticism, the impact of Lloyd’s Bank on T. S. Eliot’s poetry, and cross-disciplinary conflict between economics and literary theory in Kim Stanley Robinson’s CliFi novel, Ministry For The Future. Most of his current works-in-progress fall into one of three categories:

  • “Networks of Disunion” A homology of the print era (1835-1910) and the digital era (1990-Present) with Mark Twain treated as political economist and media theorist, as well as novelist and comedian. (See, for example, “Trollfighting Mark Twain”)
  • “The Twain Doctrine” A critique of the mythologizing of Twain’s person and works during the Cold War, as well as the enduring impact of those myths of Twain Studies and the US literary canon. (See, for example, “The Twain Doctrine”)
  • “The Cultural Consequences of John Maynard Keynes” Treatment of the economist as a literary modernist, cultural theorist, and transnational tastemaker. (See, for example, “The End of Economics”)