Matthew Garrett's writing and teaching concern the relationship between literary form and social history. His current book project, "Reading Is Theft: Literature and the Culture of Property," examines reading and dispossession since since the sixteenth century, from the picaresque to recent fiction. He is the author of Episodic Poetics: Politics and Literary Form after the Constitution (Oxford University Press, 2014) and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Narrative Theory (2018), and his essays have appeared in American Literary History, American Quarterly, Critical Inquiry, ELH, the Journal of Cultural Economy, Radical History Review, and other venues. From 2014 to 2021, he directed Wesleyan's Certificate in Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory. He was co-president of the Wesleyan University Chapter of the AAUP 2021-24.