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More specifically, Professor Matos’s research and teaching agendas explore how queer children and teens are imagined in literature and media, and how children’s books, young adult novels, teen films, and video games reinforce, disrupt, or complicate normative understandings of youth, sexuality, queerness, and growth.

Professor Matos’s current book project, tentatively titled The Reparative Possibilities of Queer Young Adult Literature and Culture (Routledge 2021), is a rigorous exploration of the queer imagination in texts and media created for teen audiences. In this monograph, Professor Matos explores how a selection of queer teen texts and films connect to the broader history of cultural hurt and oppression that has haunted the queer “canon” and imagination. This project also considers how contemporary queer teen texts encapsulate an important and enduring change in terms of how queerness is—or can be—read, perceived, and experienced. In addition to examinations of queer youth cultures and their texts, Professor Matos uses queer approaches to examine how film and media use space and place to stage various intersections of identity. Recent examples of this work include a queer analysis of space and the body in Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda series and an exploration of suburban space and ideological whiteness in Greg Berlanti’s 2018 queer teen film Love, Simon. He also co-edited a book entitled  with Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Paula Massood, which was published by Duke University Press in March 2021.

Professor Matos’s work has been published in journals such as , , , , , and . In addition to sharing his work at national conferences and in , he has also offered keynote lectures and specialized workshops on queerness and youth studies for institutions such as , The University of British Columbia, The University of Antwerp, and .

Contact for speaking engagements: amatos [at] bowdoin.edu.

Books

The Reparative Possibilities of Queer Young Adult Literature and Culture. Monograph under contract with Routledge’s Children’s Literature and Culture Series. Expected publication date: Winter 2021.