Matthew L. Reznicek
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Credentials

PhD

Associate Professor of Medical Humanities

Biography

Bio

Matthew L. Reznicek is Associate Professor of Medical Humanities at the University of Minnesota Medical School, where he uses eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and Irish literature to explore the impact of social, historical, and cultural factors in the experience of medicine and health. He has published widely on the intersection of health and citizenship in the long-nineteenth century, including on writers like Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson, Walter Scott, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charles Dickens in journals like Irish University Review, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and Éire-Ireland. His first monograph, The European Metropolis: Paris and Nineteenth-Century Irish Women Novelists, was published with Clemson University Press/Liverpool University Press in 2017. He is co-editing The Irish Bildungsroman, 1800-Present for Syracuse University Press and The Corpse in Irish Literature for Liverpool University Press. He currently serves as President of the American Conference for Irish Studies.

Research Summary

Matthew L. Reznicek utilizes Medical Humanities and History of Medicine to better understand eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and Irish Literature. He is currently completing a monograph on the politics of health in the Romantic genre of the National Tale, including works by Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), and Germaine deStaël. Previously, he has published on biopolitics and death in the National Tale; urban infrastructure and public health in nineteenth-century novels; the corpse and abjection in Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Maria Edgeworth; and on teaching healthcare inequities through Austen's Mansfield Park.

Teaching Summary

I teach at the intersection of literature and Medical Humanities or History of Medicine. Arguing that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature best reveals the impact of the Social Determinants of Health, my teaching explores ideas of health, illness, disability, and the intersection with gender and class in the works of authors like Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Walter Scott, Elizabeth Gaskell, Maria Edgeworth, and others.

Education

PhD, Queen's University Belfast

MA, Queen's University Belfast

BA, Creighton University

Professional Memberships

North American Victorian Studies Association

British Society for Literature and Science

British Association for Romantic Studies

American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures

American Society for Irish Studies

Health Humanities Consortium

Selected Publications

Reznicek, Matthew L., “A Thing of Possibilities: The Railroad and Cosmopolitical Belonging in Thurston’s Max.” Irish Women’s Writing at the Turn of the 20th Century. Ed. Kathryn Laing and Sinéad Mooney. EER Press, 2019. 89-100. Print. .

Reznicek, Matthew L., “A Swarm of Beggars and Harpies: Sympathy and the Urban Poor in the Novels of Sydney Owenson and Maria Edgeworth.” Irish Urban Studies. Ed. Sinéad Sturgeon and Steffi Lehner. Cork University Press. Accepted June 2018..

Reznicek, Matthew L., “Race in Irish Women’s Writing.” Race in Irish Literature and Culture. Ed. Malcolm Sen and Julie McCormack-Weng. New York: Cambridge University Press. Accepted August 2019..

Reznicek, Matthew L., “France and Europe in Somerville and Ross’s The Real Charlotte.” The Real Charlotte: A Critical Edition. Ed. Lisa Weihman. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Accepted February 2019..

Reznicek, Matthew L., “These Irish Investments: Money as an Organising Principle in Kate O’Brien’s As Music and Splendour (1958).” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. 44.2 (2015): 197-223. Print..

Reznicek, Matthew L., Healing the Nation: Gender, Medicine, and the Romantic National Tale. Edinburgh UP. Under Review..

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., “He Should Go to the Théâtre François: Paris and Theatrical Architecture in Maria Edgeworth’s Ormond.” Travelling Irishness in the Long Nineteenth Century. Ed. Christina Morin and Marguerite Corporaal. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 141-62. Print..

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., et al., The Irish Bildunsgroman, 1800-Present. Syracuse University Press. Under Contract. .

Reznicek, Matthew L., et al., The Corpse in Irish Literature. Liverpool University Press. Under Contract. .

Reznicek, Matthew L., Irish Women Writers and European Opera. SUNY Press. Under Contract. .

Reznicek, Matthew L., “Staging the Revolution: Gioachino Rossini’s Guillaume Tell and Sydney Owenson’s The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys.” New Hibernia Review/Iris Éireannach Nua. 22.2 (2018): 109-127. 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., “A City She Must Postpone: Parisian Bildung in Kate O’Brien’s European Fiction.” The Irish University Review. 48.1 (2018): 39-53. 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., “Absurd Speculations: The Tragedy of Development in Maria Edgeworth’s Ormond.” Nineteenth-Century Literature. 71.3 (2016): 291-314. 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. .

Reznicek, Matthew L., “The Novice in the City: Sydney Owenson and the Bildung of Metropolitan Economics.” New Critical Perspectives on Franco-Irish Relations. Ed. Anne Goarzin. New York: Peter Lang, 2015. 43-60. Print..

Reznicek, Matthew L., The European Metropolis: Paris and Nineteenth-Century Irish Women Novelists. Clemson, S.C./Liverpool, U.K.: Clemson University Press/Liverpool University Press, 2017. Print..

Contact

Administrative Contact

Mary M. Thomas, Ph.D. Program in the History of Medicine, Exec. Ofc. and Admin. Spec.

Address:
Diehl Hall
Room 525C
505 Essex Street Se
Minneapolis, MN 55455