Matt Jennings

Email: matt.jennings@mga.edu
Office: 109 School of Arts and Letters, Macon Campus
Office Phone: 478-471-5749

Matt Jennings joined the Macon State College (now Middle Georgia State University) faculty in 2007, after receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. His research interests include Native American history, early American history, and the history of violence. He is currently studying the relationship between Native American peoples and the mounds at Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park, and the intertwined history of tourism and archaeology at the site. Matt has also studied Thomas Paine’s interactions with Native Americans and the roots of John Brown’s ideas about violence. His current research includes work with the Acme Brewing Historical Society and Georgia and a study of the Ocmulgee River region during the War of 1812.

At Middle Georgia State University, Matt teaches History 2111 and 2112 (both halves of the American history survey), History 3730 (America, 1815-1848), History 3901 (Early African American History), and History 4777 and 4778 (Early and Modern Native American History). He’s taught courses on colonialism, historical methods and research, multicultural America, music in American history, Hollywood and history, and abolitionism. Matt has helped with the History Student Organization, Bibb County Early College, Atlanta Public Schools, and the TRIO program (designed to identify and support aspiring leaders from underserved populations), too.

Matt’s first book, New Worlds of Violence: Cultures and Conquests in the Early American Southeast, came out in 2011. He’s also contributed to Robbie Ethridge and Sheri Marie Shuck-Hall’s Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone and Michelle LeMaster and Brad Wood’s Creating and Contesting Carolina, and he wrote the chapter on terrorism in early America for the Routledge History of Terrorism. In 2014, his Flower Hunter and the People: William Bartram in the Native American Southeast, a new edition of Bartram’s writings on Native Americans appeared. In his most recent work, 2018’s Ocmulgee National Monument: A Brief History with Field Notes, Matt collaborated with poet Gordon Johnston to produce a history interspersed with creative pieces. Matt’s written numerous book reviews and articles for reference works. 

Matt was born in a suburb outside of Atlanta, and mostly raised in a suburb outside of Chicago. As a youngster, he lived briefly in Greenville, South Carolina, and Savannah, but he spent thirteen crucial years in Champaign, Illinois, which is why his students sometimes tell him he “talks funny.” Matt fell in love with Macon at first sight, at a conference in 2000. He did dissertation research here, and was elated to be hired at then-Macon State College. He got a chance to show his Macon love when Arcadia Publishing approached Stephen Taylor and him about writing a pictorial history of the town. Macon was published in December 2013. Matt followed that up with a pictorial history of Ocmulgee National Monument, and he’s currently engaged in a co-authored project exploring the history of brewing in Macon. He has also assisted with discussion groups at the Tubman African American Museum and serves as president of the Ocmulgee Mounds Association and has been president of the Georgia Association of Historians.

Matt lives in Macon with his wife Susan and their sons Henry and Oliver. If he’s not teaching or driving his kids around, you can find him reading, wandering around downtown, listening to music and trying to play it, running (really, it’s more like lumbering) or riding his bike out in rural Jones County, golfing poorly, and, occasionally, floating down the Ocmulgee in a tube.