Biography
Matthew Wickman teaches and writes about literature and religion, with particular emphasis on the relationship between literature and religious experience. He presently serves as Co-Chair of the Christian Spirituality Unit of the American Academy of Religion as well as Communications Director for the Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality.
When he began teaching at BYU in 2000, his interests lay in Scottish literary and intellectual history. From 2009-2012, he held a joint appointment between BYU and the University of Aberdeen, in Scotland. He returned to BYU full-time in 2012, when he was named Founding Director of the BYU Humanities Center, spending the next decade organizing lectures, symposia, research groups, colloquia, workshops, venues for student mentoring and research, and wide-ranging forms of community engagement with colleagues across BYU’s College of Humanities and scholars from around the world. It was during this time that he began teaching and writing about literature, faith, and spiritual life. His term as director of the BYU Humanities Center concluded in 2022, and he now serves as coordinator of the BYU Faith and Imagination Institute, editor of the academic journal Literature and Belief, and host of the ecumenical Faith and Imagination podcast.
His publications include more than fifty articles and book chapters as well as the 2022 book Life to the Whole Being: The Spiritual Memoir of a Literature Professor and a forthcoming (2026 or 2027) book on contemporary Christian poetry and “spiritual style.” In the area of Scottish literature, he has published the monographs The Ruins of Experience: Scotland’s “Romantick” Highlands and the Birth of the Modern Witness (2007) and Literature after Euclid: The Geometric Imagination in the Long Scottish Enlightenment (2016) and also co-edited the volume Walter Scott at 250: Looking Forward (2021).
In 2025, Wickman was named University Professor of English by Brigham Young University. Other awards include a 2018 Karl G. Maeser Research and Creative Arts Award (one of three given annually by BYU) and the 2023 John and Olga Gardner Prize, awarded by the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters for contributions to the humanities.