Matthew Paul Smith is an instructor in the English Department at Tulane University. His publications include a chapter on post-Civil War New Orleans literature in New Orleans: A Literary History (Cambridge UP, 2019) and an article on plantation tourism, narrative, and aesthetics in Southern Quarterly (2018). He has two forthcoming edited collections: The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New Orleans (Cambridge UP) and Cross Cultural Encounters in Early Modern Japan: Foreigners Within the Samurai Class, 1550-1900 (Routledge). He is a native of New Iberia, Louisiana and a current resident of New Orleans.