Matthew built on his doctoral work by focusing upon the wider relationships between politics, war and masculinity in modern Britain. His first book, The Independent Man, explored the ways in which political and personal freedom were conceived of in terms of ‘manly independence’, particularly in relation to the vote.
More recently, Matthew has worked on the social and cultural history of the military in the long eighteenth century. He explores the themes of gender and citizen soldiering in his latest book, Embodying the Militia in Georgian England.
He sits on the executive committee of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and edits the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
