Matthew Mullin

Matthew Mullin is a Ph.D. candidate in English, a recipient of a University Presidential Fellowship in Humanities and Social Sciences, and a 2024-25 distinguished graduate fellow with Notre Dame's Institute for Advanced Study. His research investigates narratives of physical disability in Early Modern England, focusing specifically on authors and characters who embrace and affirm physical difference as a generative aspect of identity formation. His dissertation, entitled "Affirmative Estrangement in Early Modern English Literature," locates literary moments when disability representation plays an affirmative role in self-fashioning, agency, and resistance to negative stereotyping. Alongside his scholarship at Notre Dame, Matthew also serves as a tutor and instructor at Westville State Prison with the Moreau College Initiative, a college-in-prison program sponsored by Holy Cross College in partnership with Notre Dame Programs for Education in Prison (NDPEP).

Conference Presentations:

"The Spiritual Biopolitics of John Milton's Blindness." Renaissance Society of America conference, 2021 .

"'To Be Blind is Not Miserable; Not to be Able to Bear Blindness, That is Miserable': John Milton and the Experience of Disability in Samson Agonistes and Other Works." Newberry Library Multidisciplinary Graduate Student Conference, 2020.

"Demarcations of Human Faciality in Milton's Comus and Paradise Lost." The Conference on John Milton, 2019.