Plenary Interview: In conversation with Dr. Matthieu Chapman

Last month I had the privilege of speaking with Dr Matthieu Chapman, one of BritGrad 2026’s Plenary Speakers, about the shape of his career and the spaces afforded to new voices in academic fields. Dr. Chapman is an Associate Professor of Theatre at the State University of New York at New Paltz, the Literary Director of NY Classical Theatre, and a seasoned writer with publications across creative writing, articles, memoir, books, essays, and journals. Our discussion explored how traditional academic structures shape not only what kinds of knowledge are valued but also who is permitted to produce it, and in what forms.

---

Áine Maher (AM): Could you briefly outline your academic or professional trajectory and your primary areas of expertise?

Matthieu Chapman (MC): Oh, boy. So my primary areas of expertise are constructions of Blackness across time and space. One of the big, sort of, specificities of the work that I do in regards to my research is that I recognize that the way the world has constructed and interprets Blackness doesn't fit into the same periods and geographical spaces that academia has largely used. When we look at nation-state analysis, we look at, you know, linear chronology. So I look at how Blackness resists those, largely looking at the spaces between early modern England and contemporary America to show that when it comes to how Blackness is interpreted by humanity the same narratives of progress perhaps don't exist.

My trajectory is perhaps a bit unique from a lot of people who end up doing this type of work, in that I'm a first-generation college student. Growing up, college just wasn't something that existed in my family. And, senior year of high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I just saw my mom and my dad working 40-50 hours a week, getting 2 weeks off a year, and I was like – I know I don't want to do that. So let me see what this college thing is. 

I got in and had no idea what I wanted to do. I started off undeclared, and then I accidentally got cast in a show. Literally – it was an accident. And it was fun, and it was challenging, and I was like, okay, I guess I'm an actor now. 

But I had never read a play in my life. I was assigned Romeo and Juliet in the 9th grade, and got halfway through Act 1, and was like, this is just… this is not… if this is the pinnacle of theater - theater is not for me. Because if I'm growing up, and my dad tells me not to date someone, and he finds out I'm dating her, I'm just getting my ass whooped, right? There is no grand tragedy, that's the end. So I just had no interest in it. And when I got cast in the show and switched to become a theater major, I felt so far behind. So I was reading a play a day, trying to catch up, just constantly working and working on the craft. And during my last year of undergrad I took theater history and I wrote this paper, and my professor was like, have you ever considered grad school? 

I applied to grad schools and I knew I wanted to act and I knew I wanted to teach, and every one of my mentors told me the same thing. They said, if you want to act or teach in this country, you need to be able to do Shakespeare. Because Shakespeare is the only playwright that every single high school student in America is assigned to read. Half of the productions in this country are Shakespeare plays. I mean, there's an entire Shakespeare theater ecosystem. And everybody's like, “he's the greatest ever”, and I'm like, to who? why? “Oh, well, the language is so beautiful”, and I'm like, have you heard Wu-Tang Clan?

Okay, then, I guess I will do Shakespeare and I'll figure out why, you know? And that was sort of how I approached it. It was not like: I love this thing, let me do it. It was, let me find out why everybody else loves this thing. 

AM: In your most recent book Shakespeare and Antiblack World-Making, you challenge the idea of Shakespeare as “universal,” writing that:

“Shakespeare told a story about a type of human” and “Shakespeare’s human was becoming the global baseline for human recognition”.

Could you speak a little about what’s at stake in interrogating that idea of the “human,” and what happens when we stop treating that story as “universal”?

CM: There’s an interview that Katherine McKittrick does with Sylvia Winter, and one of the things that Sylvia Wynter talks about is how the world functions on a biocentric construction of the human that is not actually real. That within that scientific, biological designation of “homsapien”, there are multiple, “genres” of human. And she talks about genres in relation to ethno-classes, and the dominant ethno-class is the Western bourgeoisie. When people talk about “humans”, they're actually talking about that one specific group. 

If you go back and look at it, the idea of what is “human” has consistently changed throughout history. When Spain started colonizing the Americas, they changed the definition of human to justify it. “We're gonna change what our idea of human is so that we can exclude these people, so that we can take their resources”. The idea that everyone is equally “human” falls apart at even the tiniest bit of scrutiny.

And it comes back to Shakespeare. They say, well, Shakespeare is universal. As a 13-year-old sitting in a 9th grade English class, I immediately recognized - that shit has nothing to do with me.  

Saying Shakespeare is universal doesn't tell me anything about Shakespeare, it tells me who you consider to be human. And it's not the Black kid sitting in a classroom who gets sent to the principal's office for saying, “I think Shakespeare sucks”. It tells me who you consider to be included in that group that constitutes the “universal”. 

And what if we actually look at it and say, okay, who benefits from the idea that Shakespeare is universal? Well if we are able to position Shakespeare as universal, then colonization is good. We brought this thing that encapsulates everyone's humanity to you. Now you all know how to perform humanity because you've read Shakespeare. You weren't human before, but now that you have the bard… See, colonization was good for us. It was good for you. It taught you how to be human. As if everywhere that was colonized wasn't already human. 

Shakespeare has been a tool to keep whiteness as a cultural standard and atop a cultural hierarchy.

Shakespeare is a small part of that functioning, but it is a part of it. Culturally, it's one of the ways that we test someone's ability to assimilate into an imperialist, colonizer, Western dominance worldview.

AM: Your writing includes autobiographical details and lived experiences, whilst also engaging with Afropessimism and theorists such as Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, Christina Sharpe, and Frank Wilderson. I’m curious about the relationship between theory and personal experience in your work: how much did those thinkers shape your intellectual approach, and how much was it your experiences coming into conversation with those frameworks?

MC: The reason I became an Afropessimist was because it gave me a vocabulary to explain things I already knew. Things I had already experienced, things that I lived through every single day. And it just gave me a vocabulary and a framework to actually explain why these things are occurring. Because, you know, you watch the news, and you read books, and you see all this stuff about Black progress and civil rights, and it's like, okay, well, if that's true, why is a cop pointing a gun at me for jaywalking as a 15-year-old? If we have so much progress, and racism is a thing of the past, how come we have disproportionate school outcomes based on race? The progress hasn't actually come in how the systems function, it comes in how good the system has become at hiding it.

When I first encountered Afropessimism, I resisted it as strongly as anyone. And then the more I read, and the more I understood it, and that it's not an analysis of Black people, it's an analysis of the world. And it's about how the world thinks about and functions through anti-Blackness. That was when I came to realize, oh, all of these things now that had happened in my life that I didn't have words for or couldn't contextualize suddenly started making sense.

AM: One of the things I found so compelling about your work is that intersection of abstract concepts and storytelling. Your book was one of the first times that I'd read anything that mixed theory with personal experience. Traditionally, academic criticism has encouraged a neutral voice. In school I was always taught to remove “I” and “me” from essays. Do you think autobiography is less ‘academic’ than a more neutral voice?   

MC: Memoir is no less anything. It's not less. And I guess that's the part that was always trained, was that the personal is less when it comes to the academic. 

Less academic to who? Ultimately what it boils down to is that if you can't write, like, a  white, Christian, independently wealthy, heterosexual, cisgendered man, then your voice doesn't have value.

When they say, “well, it has to be neutral” - there is no neutral.

What they consider neutral is dis-race, dis-class, dis-gendered, is all of these different things. And when it's positioned to me as neutral, it just tells me where you stand politically. 

There's no such thing as apolitical. Nothing is apolitical.

What we consider to be political and what we consider to be neutral does nothing more than reveal someone's actual stances.

So when I am told things like, “well it has to be neutral”, “you can't put ‘I’ in it”, what you are telling me is, oh, you hate Black people. Oh, you hate poor people. Oh, you hate women, because you're worried that if a woman speaks or if a Black person speaks then it's actually going to challenge this thing that you call “neutral”.

Growing up I was taught that “I” and “me”, first-person, doesn't belong in academic writing. And then, when I got to grad school, my thesis chair, Paul Menzer, was the one who really changed that. And he's like, if it's not I or me, who is it?

You are writing it, correct? “One could argue…” is literally meaningless. One could argue anything.

I am the one writing it, therefore I am the one arguing. 

And then it just comes down to –  like, part of it, too, is coming at this being an actor first, and living in America and seeing Donald Trump become president, seeing all this stuff – is that a good story beats a good argument 100 times out of 100. And if we start looking at our arguments, if we start looking at our academic writing as telling stories, because that's really all we're doing. 

And when you do it “neutrally”, when you take ‘I’ and ‘me’ out of it, you're just telling a story of white supremacy, you're telling a story of colonization, you're telling a story of imperialism and slave-owning and all these types of things. And I just want to tell different stories.

“You can't write like this”. Why not? “Because that's not how it's done”. Okay, well, who does how it's done serve? Who benefits from that? Whose disadvantages? 

That neutral voice that gets beaten into us is a voice that has hated people like me, and continues to. So why would I want to write in a voice that hates who I am? And I would rather tell other stories. Because I think other stories are valuable, right? 

It's been a decade now where everything that I have published has included autobiographical elements. It's been a decade because so much of that stuff gets erased. It gets eaten out of people when they get to these programs, and it’s important to me that in 10 years or 20 years, when people go back and look at history, that these stories exist. And it's not to say mine has any particular value or anything. But I think, how many stories of everyday people during civil rights or slavery do we not have? And then, how many things don't get published because they're not speaking in X voice, or they're not providing X methodology… 

AM: Increasingly, your work has also moved away from more conventional ‘academic’ forms and methodologies - you blend theory, performance, film script, music, and literary criticism. What prompted that shift?

MC: What prompted it was… this is gonna sound ridiculous, but – shouldn't this shit be fun?

If we're gonna dedicate so much time and so much energy and so much of our lives to it, like, shouldn't it be fun? There's a lot, a lot of stuff that people consider to be really good writing that I think is boring. And there's a lot of stuff I read, and honestly -  there's a lot of shit I've written - that is boring.

As someone who came up as an actor, someone who does a lot of live theater, I always tell people, the worst thing you can be in the theater is boring. Make them love you, make them hate you. If they come back and burn down your theater, you've won. Just don't be boring.

If more scholars who have platforms and profiles - not like public intellectuals, but actually academics with tenure jobs and named professorships - start writing papers the way they talk at conference dinners… I think the work would have more reach.  

I don't want to be boring. I'd rather have fun. And then… what avenues does it open up? 

Hopefully, it gets people to stop thinking, “I can't do that” - that thing, that idea that you have as a student, and just say, “well, that'll never get published”, or “that's not academic”. If I can get one person to read my work and go, oh, wait, maybe I can do that, then that, I think, is where the new avenues come from. And I don't know what they are, because, again if you would have gone to me or my dissertation advisor or anyone back in 2015, when I was defending, and say, “in 10 years, he's going to write an academic monograph that starts off with a film script, has 3 different introductions, and every chapter has an autobiographical framing”, they'd have said “that's… that's insane. That's impossible. That's… no… he… no one is going to do that”. And at some point, I just said, why not?

AM: That's brilliant. I found reading your work so engaging and I particularly loved when you were painting this picture of the cosmos and suddenly:

“SOUNDTRACK CHANGES. Carole King’s “I feel the Earth move” begins playing”.

Music appears frequently throughout your work; sometimes structurally, sometimes emotionally, sometimes almost as theoretical underscoring. If your life had a “soundtrack,” is there a particular song you’d have on it?

MC: I constantly have music going. If you're listening to music and it doesn't move you in some way - move you to tears, move you to dance, move you to sing - you probably just need to play different music.

In terms of, like, a specific soundtrack for my… Oh, gosh. Such a big question. If I had to pick one song, I would probably go with Rage Against the Machine, Take the Power Back.

There's a part in that song during the breakdown: 

“The teacher stands in front of the class

But the lesson plan he can't recall

The students' eyes don't perceive the lies

Bouncing off every fucking wall

His composure is well kept

I guess he fears playing the fool

The complacent students sit and listen to some of that

Bullshit that he learned in school”

It’s the recognition that so much of what we are taught has nothing to do with educating us. It has to do with indoctrination, it has to do with control, it has to do with preparing us and putting us into a system without ever questioning whether that system is ethical or should exist. Or questioning how we are serving the people we're teaching - whether that's the students in our classrooms or the people reading our work.

AM: Thank you so much for your time today. I'm so sorry, I feel like I have taken so much of it! 

CM: You never have to apologize. Can I offer just, like, a bit of unsolicited advice? You never have to apologize for taking what is being offered.

---

Dr. Chapman will be speaking at BritGrad 2026 on Friday 19th June. You can read his abstract and more information about his brilliant work here. If you haven't already got your tickets for BritGrad, secure them here.