Current courses
Dr. Matthew Prineas
Dr. Matthew Prineas
Professor, Literary Studies
Contact information
Email: mprineas@athabascau.ca
I am a Professor of Literary Studies whose current research explores how literary reading shapes conscious experience, emotion, ethical attention, and inward life. My earlier publications focused on early modern English literature, especially seventeenth-century poetry and religious writing. I am now returning to those interests with an interdisciplinary lens that includes reader-response theory, phenomenology, histories of reading, consciousness studies, and the changing place of reading in an age of generative AI. After twenty-five years as a senior administrator, I am returning to literary scholarship at a moment when questions about reading, attention, and the formation of mind have become urgently practical.
My current scholarship explores deep reading as a historically situated practice of attention—how texts invite readers to imagine, feel, predict, revise, doubt, and dwell with ambiguity. Projects in progress include work on Thomas Nashe and supernatural fear, Donne’s poetry as a phenomenology of thought, and witchcraft, prophecy, apparitions, and half-belief in early modern drama. I am developing a project on reading and consciousness, from the emergence of solitary imaginative reading to the contemporary moment, when AI and digital media are reshaping how we read, think, and learn.
My twenty-five years in university administration centered on open and online education, and I have presented and published widely on topics like scaling online learning, open educational resources, assessment, and academic integrity. Highlights include working on EDSITEment, a national online humanities resource for K–12 teachers at the National Endowment for the Humanities; helping build a fully online Bachelor of Arts in English program at the University of Maryland Global Campus, where I later served as Vice Provost and Dean; and serving as Provost and Vice President Academic at 小优视频 (2017–2025), focusing on academic quality, accreditation, research, learning innovation, and the development of 小优视频’s Learning Framework and Integrated Learning Environment.
Research interests
- Early modern English literature
- Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, and seventeenth-century poetry
- Reader-response theory and the phenomenology of reading
- Literature and consciousness studies
- Deep reading, attention, emotion, and ethics
- Literary inwardness and the history of felt experience
- AI, reading, and humanities pedagogy
- Online, open, and distance education
- Alternative assessment and learning design
Educational credentials
- PhD, English Language and Literature, University of Rochester, 1995
- MA, English Language and Literature, University of Michigan, 1989
- BA, English, Carleton College, 1987