Matthew Champion joined the University of Melbourne in 2022. His research focuses on how time was made, perceived, and experienced from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Matthew's research is currently supported by two Australian Research Council grants: the Discovery Project Albrecht Dürer's Material World in collaboration with colleagues in Melbourne, Manchester and Heidelberg and the Discovery Project "The History of the Hourglass: Temporalities, Material Culture and Science", with colleagues at the University of Manchester and the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg. His research stresses the need for nuanced local, global, comparative, material, and sensory histories or time (particularly sonic histories), alongside advocating for dialogues with Indigenous and non-European timescapes.

Following undergraduate degrees in classics, history and music at the University of Melbourne, Matthew moved to London in 2010 to write his doctorate in history at Queen Mary, University of London. After a Junior Research Fellowship at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, he took up a tenured Lectureship in Medieval History at Birkbeck, University of London in 2016. In 2020 he returned to Melbourne to a Senior Research Fellowship at the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at the Australian Catholic University. He has held fellowships at the Warburg Institute, London, the Centre for Renaissance Studies at the University of Warwick and the Newberry Library, Chicago, the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, and Queen's College, Melbourne.

Matthew's first book, The Fullness of Time: Temporalities of the Fifteenth-Century Low Countries (University of Chicago Press) was published in late 2017, and was awarded the 2018 Gladstone Prize from the Royal Historical Society. Matthew's second book, Peter de Rivo on Chronology and the Calendar (Leuven University Press, 2020) was co-authored with colleagues in Leuven and Oxford and addresses fierce debates over chronology and the calendar at the University of Leuven in the late fifteenth century.

Beyond his work on time, sound and material and visual culture, Matthew also works on the history of liturgy, religious reform and heresy, particularly the history of witchcraft and demonology, and histories of genders and sexualities, senses and emotions. His work also engages with questions of performance as historical method, and he is the founding director of the polyphony collective Cantus temporum.

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