Matt Jordan is a critical media scholar who works on the role of media in everyday culture. He was a double major in history and English at Allegheny College, and earned an MA from Drew University in modern European intellectual history. His doctorate, from Claremont Graduate University, is in European Studies.
He teaches undergraduate courses in Film Studies and a Media Studies course on Media and Democracy. His graduate teaching and research explores how different popular media forms and media technologies are used – and have been used - to constitute and reify aspects of personal identity and cultural ideology. He has written extensively on the ways in which cultural ideologies are constructed by way of ongoing conversations in communication culture in Europe, Britain and America. His latest book, Danger Sound Klaxon! The Horn That Changed History, examines the global rise and fall of the Klaxon automobile horn as a communication technology. Along with his various academic publications on sound, technology and media, his popular press essays on media culture, democracy and society have appeared in Quartz, The Washington Post, Fortune, The Huffington Post, Scroll, The New Republic, Smithsonian and have been translated for readers in Denmark, Brazil and Japan.
He is executive producer of the Penn State Humanities Institute’s Emmy-Nominated documentary seriesHumIn Focus, which is broadcast on WPSU and on the web. Along with being the Film Production and Media Studies department head in the Bellisario College, he is also leading Penn State’s News Literacy Initiative, which includes hosting a radio show/podcast called "News over Noise."
