Education

• Ph.D. 1975 University of Chicago
• M.A. 1972 University of Chicago
• B.A. 1971 University of California at Berkeley

Teaching Interests

• American literature
• Legal writing

Matthew Little received his B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1971, his M.A. from the University of Chicago in 1972, and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1975. He has taught at Mississippi State since 1976. In the 1995-96 academic year he served as Acting Department Head, and after a year off for good behavior he became Department Head in July of 1997, serving in that capacity until July of 2004. He was once a decent scholar, with articles on the likes of Henry James, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and William Faulkner. 

As a recovering administrator he has published articles on Henry David Thoreau, Edward Lear, and the origin of the word bozo (though he asserts no connection between the latter topic and the former two).  More recently he published an article on The Great Gatsby in Papers on Language and Literature, and he is a co-author of the monograph Origin of Kibosh (2017), the inaugural volume in the projected series Routledge Studies in Etymology.  He teaches the course Principles of Legal Writing every spring.​