Matthew Spellberg has been Dean of Outer Coast since summer 2022, and on faculty since the previous winter. He oversees the school’s academic pillar, and teaches courses in literature, philosophy, and Indigenous oral tradition. He also leads Tlingit language study groups, both at Outer Coast and in Sitka more broadly. He is a longtime (and hopefully lifelong) learner of Tlingit. He writes on the history of dreaming and the imagination; on oral tradition in Native North America and Europe; on Northwest Coast art; and on education and language revitalization. He was co-founder of the Native Cultures of the Americas Seminar at Harvard, and he is the creator of the Dream Parliament, an experimental protocol for reimagining dreams in a communal setting which has been performed throughout the United States and Canada. He’s also proud to serve on the planning committee for the biennial Sharing Our Knowledge Conference in Southeast Alaska. He has a PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton, and for six years taught in New Jersey prisons with the Princeton University Prison Teaching Initiative. He is an Editor-at-Large at Cabinet Magazine, and was Guest Editor of Cabinet Issue 67, on “Dreams.” Before coming to Outer Coast, he was a Visiting Critic at the Rhode Island School of Design, and a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. More information and a bibliography can be found here.
