Getting to know Dr. Matthew

Huge textbooks are on student’s desks as they prepare for Dr. Patricia Matthew’s class, with all readings for the lesson done. They also scribble last minute notes while waiting for the lesson to start, so that they are prepared to participate in the discussion. When professor Matthew arrives, she immediately starts the class, by handing out a paper filled with series of thought provoking questions about the material, which asks about aspects such as symbolism, and deeper meanings about important parts of the work, and then the students form small groups to discuss the questions. Shortly after, the class comes together to discuss, and Matthew takes the center of the classroom, asking students to share their thoughts, while giving her own intake as well by offering her brilliant insight and personal views.
Professor Patricia Matthew has been an English professor at Montclair State University for quite some time. She teaches certain courses such as Writing in the Major, and other certain topics such as poetry and British Romanticism, (which is defined as literature that was largely a reaction against the ideology of the Enlightenment period that dominated much of the European philosophy, politics and art that dominated from the mid seventeenth century until the close of the 18th century. A few of the writers that are studied in this genre are William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Felicia Hemans, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Wordsworth, and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly).
Dr. Matthew shared what created her spark of interest in literature and she said, “My first reading choice as a kid was, The Chronicles of Narnia, when I was in middle school. I read it several times and I was constantly imagining myself in those worlds.” When she was in her college years, she mentioned, “The first “A” I ever got on a paper was an essay I wrote about William Wordsworth’s, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” I’d been struggling and kept getting B’s and C’s on my papers, and then I read that poem over and over, and each time I read it I saw something else in it and had more fun trying to translate it into something that I saw. My professor told me that I had a real gift for interpretation and wrote well, and I think it is because Wordsworth took something that seemed so simple and showed beautifully how nature stays with us and heals us. I loved Shakespeare, but the passion of the Bronte novels really pulled me in, and then I read Frankenstein, and I knew I wanted to understand everything about the period, and that I wanted to help students understand that world. It is so much more vibrant and daring than most students realize, and it is fun to help them see that.”
Many of Professor Matthew’s students have strong opinions about her. She earned her bachelor’s degree at the Centenary College of Louisiana, after that, going for her masters at Northwestern State University in Massachusetts, and finally getting her doctorate at the University of Massachusetts. Because of that, the students say that she is very knowledgeable and intellectual, because he pushes her students to learn about the readings to a further extent. She is certainly not an easy teacher, and grades student work critically, which is based on having a proper analysis with full supporting evidence and details.
A former student of hers, Alyssa Shugayev, a senior English major, said, “She is a genius, but she can be intimidating at times, but it is because she is a very smart and intelligent woman. I wish that she taught and lectured more at the university because she had a lot to say. I loved taking her class.”
A unanimous student who rated her on a well-known site called, Rate My Professor said, “Perhaps people don’t expect this caliber of teaching at MSU. If you went to a more prestigious university, Dr. Matthew would be your favorite professor, by far. She is passionate about what she is teaching. She is an established writer, so of course she expects the best from you. I came out a better writer and student because of her.”
Aside from being a professor here at MSU, she also involves herself in other roles such as being the co- editor of a special issue for the Romantic Pedagogy Commons, which is a peer reviewed online journal dedicated to the presentation of essays about teaching. It offers mostly sample teaching materials on topics such as the Romantic Era in literature, and it provides questions and thought provoking thoughts on the “Romantic novel”.
She is also the editor of Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure, which is a collection of essays and interviews by and about scholars of color from around the country about their experiences on the tenure track. It is a book, and has an online blog that collects news articles and co-ed op pieces focused on the issue of diversity, affirmative action, and tenure cases under dispute. She said , “It reveals the subtle and blatant ways that academic institutions create a hostile environment for faculty of color and their ambitions for tenure while advocating support for diversity.”
“I always find something new with each class”, Matthew states. ‘I think that is what I like the most-the material changes in the hands of the students, so it’s interesting to return to it each semester, and I enjoy showing the students the connections and then seeing what has and has not changed.”