About Me

I’m Owen Matson, Ph.D.—a writer, researcher, and strategist exploring how learning, subjectivity, and meaning are shaped by the systems we build around them. My work lives at the intersection of education, media theory, and cultural criticism. I’ve spent much of my career thinking about how we learn—not just in classrooms, but across the layered ecologies of platforms, interfaces, institutions, and cultural texts.

At the core of my research is a commitment to understanding cognition as something distributed, embodied, and relational. I’m especially interested in how educational technologies frame knowledge: not only what we learn, but who we become in the process of learning. This has led me to develop theoretical concepts like the cognitive intraface—a model for rethinking AI not as a tool of automation, but as a collaborative, co-authoring presence in the learning process.

My background is in English and philosophy. I hold a Ph.D. from Princeton University, where I focused on narrative, epistemology, and the ethics of recognition. Over the years, my work has expanded into the design and strategy side of EdTech, helping bridge educational theory with product development. I’ve also written on the aesthetics of film, literature, and visual art—especially how they reflect and refract socio-political conditions. Media theory and embodiment are central concerns throughout: how technologies, stories, and interfaces don’t just carry meaning but reshape our sensory, cognitive, and affective worlds.

I’ve taught at Princeton, Georgia Tech, and in K–12 classrooms, and have published in academic and editorial venues alike—including a contribution to the Norton Critical Edition of Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins. These days, I’m developing projects that ask what learning could look like if we started from the premise that interpretation, ambiguity, and relationship aren’t problems to be solved—but the very conditions of meaningful thought.

This site is a place to share writing, invite dialogue, and explore emerging ideas. If something here resonates with you, I’d love to connect.