Matthew J. Smetona is Assistant Professor of Instruction in the Intellectual Heritage Program at Temple University. His research interests center on Critical Theory; Marxism; German Idealism; the history of political thought; and the history of the novel, especially the nineteenth-century European realist novel.

His most recent book, Recovering the Later Georg Lukács: A Study on the Unity of His Thought, is forthcoming from the MIT Press. 

His first book, Hegel’s Logical Comprehension of the Modern State, was published in 2013 by Lexington Books and reviewed in Perspectives on Politics. He is the author of peer-reviewed articles published in Interdisciplinary Literary Studies: A Journal of Criticism and Theory, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, Theoria: A Journal of Political and Social Theory, Rethinking Marxism, Telos, and Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy; book chapters published in Georg Lukács and the Possibilities of Critical Social Ontology (Brill, 2019) (ed. Michael J. Thompson) and Hegel’s Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Politics (Routledge, 2018) (ed. Michael J. Thompson); and a book review published in The Philosophical Quarterly.

He serves on the editorial board of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities as a contributing editor, and he has served as a manuscript referee for The University of Michigan Press, Routledge, European Journal of Political Theory, Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory, Journal of Social Philosophy, and Political Research Quarterly. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Temple University.