Matthew Martello

Born and raised in Appalachian Ohio, I hold degrees from The Ohio State University (B.A.) and the University of Virginia (Ph.D.): as a product of one small town and two large research institutions, I strive to show students, and to help them navigate, the expansive opportunities that college affords them. Some of these opportunities are justly instrumental: we all need jobs; and if I have learned anything from ten years of training as a scholar of English literature, it is that (life-)stories take shape when one decisive action leads to another. But I also believe that a wide-ranging liberal-arts education constitutes a good in itself—that a richer life is one in which we are able to examine a painting with pleasure, to speak a second (or third) language with ease, to recognize (dis)continuities across cultures, to marshal evidence in support of an argument. My aim as an advisor is to help students both to study what interests them now and to set themselves up for future success: indeed, when all goes well, these are one and the very same thing.