Matt Wheeler

Matt Wheeler has been involved in secondary education since 2005. Since then he has taught courses in World Literature, American Literature, and British Literature, and has also offered instruction outside of the classroom to middle school and high school students in English, history, and drumming.

Mr. Wheeler holds a BA in English Literature from the University of California at Santa Barbara (2001) and a Masters in Teaching from Chapman University (2008). The summer of 2014 saw Mr. Wheeler earn his doctoral candidacy as a graduate student in the Mythological Studies PhD program at Pacifica Graduate Institute, where his studies focused on gaining an understanding of human experience as revealed in mythology and in the manifold links between myth, ritual, literature, art, and religious experience. His dissertation, tentatively titled "Fordings Toward Grace: Myth and Memory in Dante's Divine Comedy," approaches Dante Alighieri's fourteenth-century epic poem as both a mythic text and as an autobiographical myth in order to illustrate how memory -- the way in which humans re-member the biographical experiences and historical events of the past -- is fundamentally mythopoeic, or myth-making, and is thus consequently in perpetual search of a myth to live by. Mr. Wheeler also serves as the technical editor for the Mythological Studies Journal, an annual online publication run by current and former graduate students of the Mythological Studies program at Pacifica Graduate Institute.

A native son of Hermosa Beach, Mr. Wheeler resides with his wife and two sons, Kellan and Owen, in the South Bay. Somewhere between honoring his duties as father, husband, teacher, and doctoral student, Mr. Wheeler enjoys surfing and paddle-boarding in his home waters of the South Bay, and is always on the lookout for that ever elusive moment where he can actually read for pleasure