Matthew Jennings White is a Ph.D. candidate in the American Studies Program, where his work focuses on American religious history. White's dissertation, currently entitled "'Eager Longing For the Revealing of the Children of God': Premillennialism and UFO-Based Spiritualities in Contemporary America" focuses on two forms of contemporary American religion: the pretribulational premillennialism of much of today's evangelical Protestant movements typified by the "Left Behind" series and its notions of a sudden "rapture" that will lift devoted Christians off the face of the earth prior to the rise of a global "Tribulation," and UFO-based spiritualities that, while on the surface quite different, nonetheless share many parallel themes to premillennialism, not least of which are a deep concern over the ambiguous effects of science and technology on American life, and indeed a belief among many "UFOian" believers in the potential approach of a great "alien rapture," made most infamous in the tragedies associated with the Heaven's Gate mass suicide of the 1990s. White earned his B.A. and Master of Liberal Arts degrees at the University of Richmond. In the fall and spring of 2004-5 and most recently in the May term of 2005, he returned to the University of Richmond to offer courses in contemporary American religion. At William and Mary, White has had the opportunity to work with such diverse scholars as Bob Gross, Chandos Brown, Rich Lowry, and Charles McGovern, for whom he also served as a teaching assistant, and his dissertation director is Professor Maureen Fitzgerald. One of the highlights of White's time at William and Mary came in 2002, when he was awarded the Dean's Prize for Outstanding Scholarship on Women in recognition of his reassessment of British-American author Charlotte Lennox in "Lies, Cross-Dressing, and a Little Romance: A New Reading of Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote."

Book Review: Consuming Religion, The Emphatic Christian Center, and The Fourth Great Awakening]. Perspectives in Religious Studies (2005): 205-209.

Religion in America, "cults" and alternative/new religious movements, contemporary American apocalypticism, UFO-based religious movements, religious polemic in the formation of American cultural identities, Catholicism and anti-Catholicism in American evangelical subcultures