Rate My Professor Mathew Pehl

Mathew Pehl is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Texas Tech University. He earned his Ph.D. in American History from Brandeis University. Prior to his appointment at Texas Tech University, he taught at Augustana University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where he was named the Orin M. Loftus Distinguished Professor in recognition of his research and teaching contributions.

Dr. Pehl is a historian of the post-Reconstruction United States whose work centers on class identity and religious cultures. His research has addressed topics including Midwestern feminism and prison-labor policy during the New Deal era. His book The Making of Working-Class Religion, published by the University of Illinois Press in 2016, explores the reciprocal influences of religion and class among Catholic, African American, and southern-born white evangelical workers in twentieth-century Detroit. He is currently developing a book project titled The Battle for the Blue: How the 1960s Remade the Police, which offers a labor history of urban policing during the long 1960s. In 2019 he participated in a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute in Charleston, South Carolina, focused on the history of Jews in the American South, and in 2014 he attended a Council of Independent Colleges institute on the history of Chicago. Dr. Pehl is completing an M.A. in Documentary Journalism at the University of Missouri and produced the short film Cowboy Strike in 2024, which examines legacies of cowboy mythology in West Texas. He has expressed interest in integrating filmmaking into his history courses at Texas Tech University to foster media-savvy scholarship.