Education

• PhD in English, 2014 Queen's University Belfast; 

• M.A. in English with Distinction, 2009 Queen’s University Belfast

Specialties: 

Health Humanities, Nineteenth-Century Literature,  Romanticism, Irish Literature, Social Determinants of Health, Women Writers, Biopolitics, Disability Studies

Professional Background

Matthew L. Reznicek studies Health Humanities, which means he applies humanistic research methodologies to the fields of health, medicine, and care. Specifically, Reznicek is interested in the ways that health, illness, and the body are shaped by social, cultural, and political forces and represented in literature from the long-nineteenth century. He writes about the relationship between health and society in novels by writers like Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Maria Edgeworth, and Walter Scott. Reznicek uses literature in his courses to show how the Social Determinants of Health impact medicine and care well beyond the walls of the hospital. He currently serves as President of the American Conference for Irish Studies.

Teaching Subjects

• Health Humanities
• Disability Studies
• Gender and Health
• Health and the Nineteenth-Century

Books

The European Metropolis: Paris and Nineteenth-Century Irish Women Novelists (Clemson University Press, 2017); The Irish Bildungsroman, 1800-Present (Syracuse University Press, Forthcoming); The Corpse and Irish Literature (Liverpool University Press, Forthcoming)

Selected Publications

• Reznicek, Matthew L., “National Reproduction: Birth, Death, and Biopolitics in the National Tale.” Race, Violence, Form: The Referent of Ireland. Eds. Mary Mullen and Renée Fox. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, Forthcoming. 

• Reznicek, Matthew L., “‘Haunted by a Sense of Deformity’: Disability, Illness, and Citizenship in Irish and Scottish Gothic Fiction.” Irish University Review 53.1, 2023. 48-67. Print.

• Reznicek, Matthew L., “‘He Does Not Suffer Now’: Death and Biopolitics of Citizenship in the National Tale.” Life, Death and Consciousness in the Long Nineteenth Century. Ed. Lucy Cogan and Michelle O’Connell. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2022. 119-137. Print.

• Reznicek, Matthew L., “Fevered Anxieties: Public Health, Urban Infrastructure, and Infectious Classes in Austen, Edgeworth, and Scott.” Locating Classed Subjectivities: Intersections of Space and Working-Class Life in Nineteenth-, Twentieth-, and Twenty-First-Century British Writing. Ed. Simon Lee. New York: Routledge, 2022. 20-37. Print.

• Reznicek, Matthew L., “Dead Bodies and the Abject Sight of Poverty: Monstrous Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century Novels.”  The Routledge Companion to Literature and Class.  Ed. Gloria McMillan.  New York: Routledge, 2021.  293-305.  Print.

• Reznicek, Matthew L., “It was Sickness and Poverty Together: Teaching Inequality and Health Humanities in Austen’s Emma.”  Teaching the Eighteenth-Century Today.  Ed. Miriam Wallace.  Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP.  Forthcoming 2023.