Dr. Matt Boyd Smith

Assistant Professor of Communication Studies - Humanities

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Matt Boyd Smith joined Young Harris College in Fall 2022. His research is focused on the industrial and cultural histories of popular formulas and genres across media boundaries, with a special emphasis on the horror genre and comic books.

Dr. Smith has frequently presented elements of his own work at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual conference, where he is active in organizational leadership and a member of the Horror, Media Industries, Television Studies, and War and Media Studies scholarly interest groups. He has been published in In Media Res, New Review of Film and Television Studies, and has a chapter on Nick Fury and Marvel Comics during the Cold War in the Handbook of Comics and Graphic Narratives (DeGruyter, 2021).

He is currently working on a book project called Trans-Media Multiplicities: Genre and Formula in the Age of Media Convergence, which traces how popular formulas like ghost-hunting reality shows, true crime podcasts, and teen horror are adapted, transferred across, and bleed through the boundaries of traditional media platforms and technologies in the Twenty-First Century.

At Young Harris College, Dr. Smith enjoys teaching courses that allow students to explore the intersections of media production and popular culture, including Introduction to Information Society, Media Literacy, and Critical Theory. He has found the students at YHC to be willing to learn and become engaged and conversant in areas of study where they may have initially been hesitant.

In his spare time, he enjoys watching old black-and-white movies, and television shows from the 1960s and ‘70s, hiking in the Appalachian mountains, spending time reading on his porch with a good cup of coffee, and spending as much time as possible with his partner and their two dogs.

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