Matthew runs the Cities Imaginaries project as part of UCL's Urban Lab, where he looks at the metropolitan city in literature.
Matthew is a Professor of English Literature at University College London in the UK, where he is Co-Director of the UCL Urban Laboratory and runs the Cities Imaginaries strand of the project.
Matthew's work focuses on representations of the metropolitan city, particularly at nighttime. He also studies nineteenth-century literature, film, crime fiction, utopian and dystopian literature, and many other genres of English literature and literary theory.
Imagining new worlds in speculative fiction, fantasy and sci fi doesn't just help us envision possible futures; it also gives us a powerful way to think about our world as it is now. What do our fictional worlds tell us about the world we want to live in?