Assistant Professor

Email: matthew.helm@bilkent.edu.tr
Phone: +90 (312) 290
Office: G

Matthew Helm is a scholar of twentieth and twenty-first century transnational American literature and culture. He received his PhD in English with a Certificate in College Teaching from the University of Iowa in 2024. His scholarship has appeared in The Nathaniel Hawthorn Review, Religion & Literature, Studies in the Novel, and differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies.

Matthew’s current research brings together insights from media theory and sexuality studies. His work-in-progress book, titled Transmediations: Media Materialism in the Archives of Queer Literature, embeds literary works by LGBT-identified authors within a history of rapid media evolutions, examining the central role of specific media technologies in the making of queer art, identity, and activism. For example, his recent article in differences, “The Goddess in the Machine: The Radiophonics of Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name,” elucidates how poet Audre Lorde repurposes the radio from a propaganda machine into a tool for feminist mythmaking. Other chapters in the project will stage similar encounters between Christopher Isherwood and the telephone, John Rechy and the phonograph, Harvey Fierstein and Tony Kushner and the television, as well as Andrea Lawlor and the cassette tape.

Before Bilkent, Matthew was a Graduate Teaching and Research Fellow in the American Studies Department at TU Dortmund University (2022-2023) in Germany, where he taught courses on media and the archive, critical food studies, and Hollywood film.