Matt Johnson is Assistant Professor in the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic+ at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He previously taught at Lund University in Sweden and at the Ohio State University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2022. 

His teaching and research center on Yiddish- and German-language literature and cultural history from the 18th century to the present. He also has active interests in the memory and representation of the Holocaust; the history and practice of testimony across media; feminist approaches to literature, film, and photography; the interface between archival studies and literary studies; and the queer novel.  His work tends to be broadly comparative and often extends to different linguistic, regional, and temporal contexts. 

His writing has appeared in the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, the Jahrbuch für europäisch-jüdische Literaturstudien, The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, and German Studies Review, among other venues. He currently serves as a core member of the peer review editorial team of In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies. To see a full list of publications, click here. 

Matt's research has been supported by the Centre for Modern European Studies (Copenhagen), the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, the Center for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies at Ohio State, the German Literature Archive (DLA) Marbach, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the Yiddish Book Center, the Posen Society of Fellows, the Fulbright Program, and the IFK Vienna. He has also completed internships at the Jewish Museum Vienna and at the Archives of the Leo Baeck Institute in New York and Berlin. 

In his teaching, Matt is particularly committed to training and mentoring students in advanced research in the humanities and interpretive social sciences. At the University of Chicago, he worked at the College Center for Research and Fellowships and helped organize two summer programs focused on undergraduate research, and at Ohio State, he was the recipient of an Undergraduate Research Access Innovation Seed Grant. At UW–Madison, he currently serves as a faculty mentor in the Undergraduate Research Scholars Program.