Matthew Jordan

Matt Jordan is a critical media scholar who works on the role of media in everyday culture. He was a double major in history and English at Allegheny College, and earned an MA from Drew University in modern European intellectual history. His doctorate, from Claremont Graduate University, is in European studies.

He teaches undergraduate courses in film studies and directs the film studies minor. His graduate teaching and research explores how popular media forms and media technologies are used to constitute and reify aspects of personal identity and cultural ideology. He has written extensively on the ways in which cultural ideologies are constructed by way of ongoing conversations in and about popular culture in Europe, Britain and America. He is currently working on two books that examine the management and mediation of sound as a problem in global modernity: one that traces the rise and fall of the Klaxon automobile horn as a feature of the early 20th century soundscape, and another that traces the genealogy of “quietness” media technologies and the phenomenon of “commodity quietness” to explain and critique the problematic ubiquity of such technologies today. His essays on media culture and society have appeared in Quartz, The Washington Post, Fortune, The Huffington Post, Scroll, The New Republic, Smithsonian and elsewhere. He was featured in the 2014 film "Happy Valley," and in June 2018 appeared in a Brookings Institution/SSRC broadcast on “The Consequences of Misinformation” on C-SPAN.

He is co-director of Public Humanities Initiative at the Humanities Institute at Penn State, serving as executive producer of the new web series HumIn Focus. Along with serving as a Faculty Senator, and sitting on the board of the Center for Humanities and Information at Penn State, he is currently North American representative to the Board of the Association for Cultural Studies.

• Personal Site
• HumIn Focus

• Emily Wilder and journalism’s longstanding Achilles’ heel – partisans who cry bias
• What does the Penn State community think of celebrity involvement in politics?
• Latest HumIn Focus episode examines history, complexities of American democracy
• Penn State students, professors discuss the repurposing of Pepe the Frog and meme culture
• Movie theaters are on life support – how will the film industry adapt?
• Second episode of WPSU-TV's 'HumIn Focus' examines immigration on Nov. 24
• VIDEO: Social Media and False Information (Brookings Institution / May 31, 2018)
• AUDIO: Starving the Beast - Defunding Higher Education
• Why it’s so hard to automate ‘clickbait’ away
• PODCAST: Facebook is not a democracy
• Our centuries-long quest for ‘a quiet place’
• From fake news to fabricated video, can we preserve our shared reality?
• A century ago, progressives were the ones shouting 'fake news'
• Long Strange Trip Remembers The Grateful Dead
• VIDEO: Talking Together About Guns: Armor of Light
• In a post-truth election, clicks trump facts
• College Town Film Festival celebrates independent film
• Democratic ideals versus realpolitik, a populist struggle for all times
• Netflix isn't made for the U.S. anymore -- it's for the whole world
• How ratings-driven debates are weakening American democracy
• Should movie studios be worried about Netflix's first feature film?
• Bracketology
• Festival will celebrate independent film with screenings, discussions
• Penn Staters lending talents to inaugural Thaw Festival