Dr Matthew Harle

Biography

Matthew Harle is a Barbican-Guildhall Archive Curator and former Research Fellow (2016-2019) who is part of the team assembling and interpreting the Barbican’s archives for the Centre’s 40th anniversary in 2022. He was part of the team that won a £90,000 grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund for the Laying the Foundations project (2019-20), and he is also an Archive Consultant on the Gulbenkian's Radical Roots project in 2019.

As a writer and curator, Matthew is interested in the cultural histories of cities, everyday life, diasporas, artist’s film and television, archive collections and their collectors. His recent projects include the film seasons Here Lies Jonathan Meades and Radical Broadcasts, both at the Whitechapel Gallery and BFI; as well as books on the fabled Play For Today, Penda’s Fen (Of Mud & Flame, Strange Attractor Press, 2019) and a collection of the author BS Johnson’s rejected proposals to the BBC (Can I Come In and Talk About These and Other Ideas, Texte und Töne, 2020).

He is currently working on a range of projects including CIVIC TV, an exploration of radically democratic and artist-led British public-access television; editorial work for the Rita Keegan Archive Project; and a new book investigating a found Berlin address book from 1931.

Matthew finished an AHRC-funded PhD in English Literature at Birkbeck in 2016. His thesis was turned into a monograph, entitled Afterlives of Abandoned Work: Creative Debris In the Archive (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). His other academic work has been published in Screen, City and Literature/Film Quarterly and he has written for Sight & Sound, Times Literary Supplement and Cineaste among others. matthewharle.com