Faculty Feature: Dr. Matthew Leporati
7/2/2025
Associate Professor Has the Write Stuff and Brings His Scholarship into the Classroom
Associate Professor of English Matthew Leporati, PhD is the quintessential teacher-scholar.
Not only does he learn to teach, but he teaches to learn—constantly seeking to evolve the symbiotic relationship between his research and his role in the classroom.
“I see scholarship and teaching as mutually enriching,” Dr. Leporati explained. “I do scholarship to be a better teacher, and I teach to be a better scholar. My students—past, present, and future—are at the heart of all I do, and I wouldn’t be where I am today without them.”
Dr. Leporati joined the University of Mount Saint Vincent community nearly a decade ago—in 2016—as a non-tenure track instructor. That quickly changed when the Mount’s administration saw how deeply he lived the University’s mission both within and beyond the classroom, and he now holds a tenured position as an Associate Professor.
He teaches students at nearly every level of the Undergraduate College, including students in the HEOP pre-first year seminar, Honors Program seminars, first-year writing courses, and seniors completing their English capstone course.
Over the years, we’ve shared a few highlights of Dr. Leporati’s career, including co-authoring a chapter called “Peeling The Onion: Pop Culture Satire in the Writing Classroom” in a collection that appeared in Isn’t It Ironic? Irony and Popular Culture with fellow Professor of English Rob Jacklosky, PhD and authoring his first academic book, “Romantic Epics and the Mission of Empire,” a monograph published by Cambridge University Press.
We had the opportunity to catch up with Dr. Leporati to learn more about his recent endeavors in teaching, scholarship, and more.
Let’s start with that book.
The content of “Romantic Epics and the Mission of Empire” grew from Dr. Leporati’s doctoral dissertation. Even before he defended the dissertation, he knew he wanted to grow it into a book—but he worried that the “prestige” of publishing is diminishing in today’s day and age (after all, anyone can publish anything on Amazon…).
That’s why it’s even more impressive that Dr. Leporati’s book was published by Cambridge University Press, one of the globe’s most respected publishing houses. And not only was it published, but it also passed peer review—which vindicates his scholarship and years of hard work!
“Publishing this book is the highlight of my scholarly career, and it was a decade in the making,” said Dr. Leporati. “Having the book published is very gratifying, and having it recognized by others is very satisfying.”
But it doesn’t stop there, of course.
Not only was “Romantic Epics and the Mission of Empire” well received by his peers, Ross Wilson of The Times Literary Supplement also shared a very favorable review of the book.
“The review ends by calling my book a ‘considerable achievement of scholarship and criticism’—what more could you ask for?!”
Working on this book is intricately connected to all Dr. Leporati does at the Mount. In fact, he described his classrooms as a “microcosm” of his larger work as a scholar. He’s brought excerpts from the book into his classes to enrich discussions, but—more generally—the method of writing the book has informed nearly everything he does as a teacher.
“What my students do in class is a microcosm of my process in writing the book: researching, learning, close reading, structuring an argument, choosing the best terms to present thoughts to an audience, revising, and polishing,” Dr. Leporati explained. “I want my students to see that I don’t just preach—I practice with them.”
And although Dr. Leporati’s book discusses in depth the use of the epic (a long, narrative poem in an elevated style that recounts the deeds of a legendary or historical hero) in Romantic poetry, he is also widely interested in the work of William Blake—a poet who challenged the blossoming use (or overuse?) of epic in the Romantic age.
Dr. Leporati has been interested in Blake since he was an undergrad, citing that it’s Blake’s mixture of image and text that really drew him in. As an English major during his undergraduate studies, he wrote a close reading of two of Blake’s most famous works, “The Lamb” and “The Tyger,” and wrote pages and pages on two rather short poems! It was in that moment that Dr. Leporati knew that he wanted to go to graduate school to study English, and he committed himself to reading the complete poetry of William Blake. Since then, he’s written countless articles on Blake and reviews of books on Blake scholarship in European Romantic Review, The Journal of the Blake Society, and more.
“The close attention to text (and image) can be so productive to thought,” shared Dr. Leporati. “It’s so interesting that I’m thinking about creating a class based solely on Blake—and my research gives me the opportunity to think about how to present my ideas about his art to both my students and larger audiences.”
Additionally, last year Dr. Leporati gave an online presentation for the Global Blake Network on the connection between William Blake and James Joyce, titled “There’s Lots of Blake in ‘Finnegans Wake.’” And he has two forthcoming online presentations: another for the Global Blake Network on the connection between Blake and German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and one for the Blake Society on reconciling Blake’s work with scientific thinking.
Now, speaking of Joyce, we segue to another one of Dr. Leporati’s literary interests: the (often dubbed mysterious) work of Modernist author and poet James Joyce.
Dr. Leporati has always been taken by “complex” literature—and scholars know that it doesn’t get more complex than Joyce! Always wanting to dive deeper into Joyce, Dr. Leporati actually picked up “Finnegans Wake” during the height of COVID-19 lockdown as a pandemic project of sorts, seeking to really—and he means really—annotate the text.
“The book opened itself to me. I was finding things I had never picked up on before. The pandemic prevented me from attending conferences on Joyce, so I began writing emails about my discoveries to close friends—and then it dawned on me: why not turn this into a web project?”
And that’s where his blog on Joyce’s final novel “Finnegans Wake,” thesuspendedsentence.com, came to life. Whenever he’s in the mood, he shares his thoughts on snippets of the book with the world in his blog. Similar to Joyce’s famous stream-of-consciousness writing, Dr. Leporati’s blog isn’t extra professional or polished—he shares whatever comes to mind about the book, whenever he feels like it. He calls out a particular post that illustrates not only how it’s a platform for him to “babble on” about his interests, but a chance for him to communicate insights he’s gleaned from a close reading of the novel.
Several years ago, Dr. Leporati wrote an article about his experiments with bringing emojis into class discussions when close reading texts by Blake, and the article won the Bege Bowers Prize for best article at the College English Association Forum in 2022. This sparked an even larger interest as he began to think about how to incorporate internet memes into his work on Joyce.
His forthcoming article on “Finnegans Wake” and internet memes, “There’s Lots of Memes in ‘Finnegans Wake:’ Joyce’s Anticipation of Twenty-First-Century Memetic Communication,” started as a joke—of sorts.
“I tested out the idea as a conference paper, and there I was at a serious academic conference displaying and discussing absurd internet memes,” Dr. Leporati said with a chuckle. “But I discovered that there was indeed a fruitful analogy. A meme is a unit of culture that evolves over time—rather quickly nowadays with the help of the internet. To understand a lot of these memes, you need a context. Without it, you’re left completely puzzled. And that’s ‘Finnegans Wake’—if you have the context, it unlocks potential meaning to the complicated book.”
Based on his work with “Finnegans Wake” and memes, Dr. Leporati hopes to develop lessons on memes in connection with written text, possibly using Joyce and/or Blake. It’s still a work in progress, but Dr. Leporati shares that developing these sorts of lessons, with an emphasis on in-class writing, might be a good way to engage students while also reducing reliance on AI.
For the past seven years, Dr. Leporati has also organized, run, and participated in roundtable discussions on mindfulness and pedagogy at the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) conference. He describes mindfulness as awareness of thought and awareness of the present moment without judgement—think meditation. That’s exactly what Dr. Leporati tries to generate in his classes.
“I ask my students: ‘What are you thinking or feeling right now about this text?’ To me, thinking is an embodied act (like talking with your hands or pacing around a room). Thinking starts from an intuition or feeling. When you encounter a text, it gives you a mental, but also a physical or emotional reaction. I then ask my students: ‘What are your initial impressions of a text? What are your raw thoughts or reactions? How do we refine that into something more formal?’”
Out of the roundtable forums mentioned above came a collection of essays on mindfulness and teaching that was published in Modern Language Studies, which Dr. Leporati co-edited and co-introduced. His presentation at NeMLA this year concerned the dangers of AI use for students. Dr. Leporati described AI as “pernicious” because it robs students of the opportunity to refine their ideas with gradual revision—and that’s not mindful!
It’s evident that Dr. Leporati is more than just a professor: he’s a mentor, a friend, and a living embodiment of the Mount’s mission.
“My classes, especially freshmen writing classes, support, endorse, and assist in the execution of the University’s mission by challenging students to achieve academic excellence, develop skills that are at the heart of the liberal arts tradition, and utilize these skills to work toward a better, more inclusive world that struggles against the injustices that persist today,” Dr. Leporati explained.
He understands that even the smallest structural elements of writing carry enormous logical and rhetorical implications, which then have a tremendous impact on a student’s quality of thought, persuasiveness, and the physical actions that are inseparable from their thoughts, speech, and writing.
And if that isn’t the work of a quintessential teacher-scholar, then we don’t know what is!
Thank you, Dr. Leporati, for all your work within the classroom and beyond. We can’t wait to see what you’ll share with us next!
About the University of Mount Saint Vincent
Founded in 1847 by the Sisters of Charity, the University of Mount Saint Vincent offers a nationally recognized liberal arts education and a select array of professional fields of study on a landmark campus overlooking the Hudson River. Committed to the education of the whole person, and enriched by the unparalleled cultural, educational, and career opportunities of New York City, the University equips students with the knowledge, skills, and experiences necessary for lives of achievement, professional accomplishment, and leadership in the 21st century.