Matthew Houdek Headshot

Matthew Houdek

Senior Lecturer

University Writing Program
Academic Affairs

Office Location

Matthew Houdek

Senior Lecturer

University Writing Program
Academic Affairs

Bio

I joined the University Writing Program in 2018 after completing my PhD in Communication Studies at the University of Iowa. My pedagogy centers on questions of racial/social justice, social change, critical media studies, rhetoric, intersectionality, and democratic and civic engagement, all of which is informed by my doctoral training, personal commitments, and scholarship. In my classes, I invite students to challenge their preconceived conceptions of the world by engaging expert and other critical/activist perspectives on the above themes through different modalities of critical thinking, discussion, reading, writing, presentations, reflection, and revision. As such, the readings and texts I assign primarily center the voices and perspectives of BIPOC and other marginalized scholars, authors, and activists as I encourage a classroom space grounded in accountability, humility, empathy, and “rhetorical listening” (Ratcliffe). With these themes and perspectives in mind, students will conduct cross-disciplinary humanities-based research to make informed, critical arguments in written or presentation form while continuously revising their work for improvement and by joining and contributing to academic conversations through integrating credible sources in ethical ways. Together, students and I will consider what it means to live in this unprecedented moment of heightened inequality, inequities, and precarity, mis- and dis-information, intensified restrictions of civil liberties and human rights, and ascendent fascism across the globe… and how one might help bring about a better possible future for all. 

Matthew Houdek is a transdisciplinary communication studies critic and theorist whose research and teaching interests include Black studies, rhetorical studies, breathing and suffocation, Black feminist and WoC theory/thought, whiteness studies, temporality, memory studies, critical media studies, intertextuality, abolition, critical university studies, writing studies, epistemologies of the south, decoloniality, political ontology, and more. His essays have appeared in such journals as Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Women’s Studies in Communication, Rhetoric, Politics, & Culture, the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, and the Oxford Encyclopedia of Communication, among others. He is currently working on a book project tentatively titled "Black Breath and End of the World: Abolition, Suffocation, and the Democracy to Come." He lives in Rochester with his wife/partner, Holland, who is a metals artist and assistant professor at Nazareth College. 

Select Scholarship

Matthew Houdek, “In the aftertimes, breathe: Rhetorical technologies of suffocation and an abolitionist praxis of (breathing in) relation.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 108, No. 1 (2022): 48-74

Matthew Houdek and Ersula J. Ore, “Cultivating otherwise worlds and breathable futures,” Rhetoric, Politics & Culture 1, No. 1 (2021): 85-95

Matthew Houdek, “Metaphors to live and die by,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 24, No. 1-2 (2021): 269-290

Matthew Houdek, “Recontextualizing responsibility for justice: The lynching trope, racialized temporalities, and cultivating breathable futures.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 18, No. 2 (2021): 139-162

Matthew Houdek and Kendall R. Phillips, “Rhetoric and the temporal turn: Race, gender, temporalities.” Introduction to the special issue. Women’s Studies in Communication 43, No. 4 (2020): 369-383

Ersula J. Ore and Matthew Houdek, “Lynching in times of suffocation: Toward a spatiotemporal politics of breathing.” Women’s Studies in Communication 43, No. 4 (2020): 443-458

Matthew Houdek, "Racial sedimentation and the common sense of racialized violence: The case of black church burnings." Quarterly Journal of Speech 104No. 3 (2018): 279-306

Matthew Houdek, "The imperative of race for rhetorical studies: Toward divesting from disciplinary and institutionalized whiteness." Introduction to the “Race and Rhetoric” forum. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, No. 4 (2018): 292-299

Currently Teaching

UWRT-150
3 Credits
Writing Seminar is a three-credit course limited to 19 students per section. The course is designed to develop first-year students’ proficiency in analytical and rhetorical reading and writing, and critical thinking. Students will read, understand, and interpret a variety of non-fiction texts representing different cultural perspectives and/or academic disciplines. These texts are designed to challenge students intellectually and to stimulate their writing for a variety of contexts and purposes. Through inquiry-based assignment sequences, students will develop academic research and literacy practices that will be further strengthened throughout their academic careers. Particular attention will be given to the writing process, including an emphasis on teacher-student conferencing, critical self-assessment, class discussion, peer review, formal and informal writing, research, and revision. Small class size promotes frequent student-instructor and student-student interaction. The course also emphasizes the principles of intellectual property and academic integrity for both current academic and future professional writing.
UWRT-365
3 Credits
Civic engagement describes the different ways individuals and collectives work to identify public concerns, defend or redefine public values, seek to correct historical injustices, and make positive change for the common good or a specific community. In this course, students will gain an understanding of key concepts and vocabulary within interdisciplinary civic engagement and social justice literature, engage a variety of contemporary issues of public concern and the groups that seek to address these issues through different forms of civic engagement, and learn about the role rhetoric plays within these diverse and situated civic contexts. Students will identify a public concern (i.e. homelessness, voting restrictions, health care disparities, environmental racism, economic inequality, the school-to-prison pipeline) they want to learn more about; identify a group or groups seeking to address that issue through practices of civic engagement; and analyze, research, and present on that issue and group through formal and informal writing and public speaking/presentation assignments. Students will learn tools and perspectives in rhetorical analysis and genre awareness, effective writing practices for a college-level humanities course, effective public speaking/presentation skills, and revision and workshopping strategies for both writing and presentation contexts.

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