Matthew Smith earned his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, where his research focused on avant-garde poetry and translation studies. He sees himself as a generalist, with an ever-evolving set of interests across French and Francophone studies, including a renewed interest in applied linguistics and Second Language Acquisition. Before joining University of Chicago in 2025, he was Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Northern Illinois University where he taught courses ranging from introductory French to advanced culture classes on the history of colonialization and decolonization, the documentary impulse in French and francophone film, and the cultural politics of stand-up comedy.
An active translator, he has brought more than ten French-language works into English, spanning prose fiction, experimental poetry, and critical theory. His teaching resists rigid disciplinary boundaries, exploring intersections between fields and the ways one area of inquiry can broaden—or unsettle—our understanding of another. In all his classes he encourages risk-taking, experimentation, creativity, critical thinking, and student autonomy and agency.