Matthew Levay is a Preceptor in the Harvard College Writing Program, where he also serves as a Faculty Associate for the Harvard Writing Project. He received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington, and earned a B.A., also in English, at Vanderbilt University.

He specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature and culture, with particular interests in modernism, the history and theory of the novel, and popular print culture in England and America (especially genre fiction, comics and graphic narratives, and periodicals). His articles and reviews have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal of Modern Literature, Modernist Cultures, Modernism/modernity, Twentieth-Century Literature, the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, and Modern Language Quarterly.

Levay has just completed a book manuscript on the representation of criminality in modernist fiction from the late nineteenth century to the 1950s, which argues that authors of the period employed the figure of the criminal as a case study for understanding the limits of psychological representation in fiction, and thus turned to the genre of crime fiction in order to imagine new ways of conceptualizing the criminal mind. He has recently started a new book project on modernism and seriality, which asks how and why a number of twentieth-century British novelists -- including Ford Madox Ford, Dorothy Richardson, John Galsworthy, Wyndham Lewis, Samuel Beckett, and Anthony Powell, among others -- experimented with serial and sequential forms, and explores the prominent yet underappreciated role that serial narratives played in shaping modernist aesthetics.