Matthew Childs

Bio

Matthew Childs earned his B.A. and M.A. at Florida State University and his Ph.D. at the University of Washington in Seattle.

He has three main areas of research. The first centers on the intersection of intellectual history and literary studies, with in-depth examinations of the development of concepts in and through literature. Presently, he focuses on tracing shifts and constancies of catastrophe and critique in literature from the eighteenth to the early-twentieth century. In addition to his book project, Catastrophe and Critique: A Dialectic of German Modernity, he is co-editing and contributing to a volume of essays titled Critical Catastrophe Studies. In the course of his work, he focuses on the work of figures like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Heinrich von Kleist, Ludwig Tieck, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Jeremias Gotthelf, Adalbert Stifter, Wilhelm Raabe, Theodor Storm, and Walter Benjamin.

His second area of research concerns race and race discourses in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well as German colonialism and imperialism, and the entanglements between them. A recent forum publication in the Goethe Yearbook, “Goethe’s Faust and Sorge in the Age of  Imperialism and Colonialism,” explores Goethe’s critique of the latter systems and will be complimented by an article-length contribution to an expected edited volume following a presentation for the upcoming GSA seminar on “Diversities of Care in the Long-Nineteenth-
Century.” He is also collaborating on a co-authored book with Prof. Jonathan Warren (University of Washington) titled Race and Germany: History, Discourse, Pathways, for which he is writing chapters on the early development of race and race theory in Germany as well as the contemporary discussions of “woke culture” in German opinion pages.

Matthew’s third area of research is in the environmental humanities, where he pays particular attention to energy in its physical forms and metaphorical or symbolic significances. An upcoming article with On_Culture considers Wilhelm Raabe’s Pfisters Mühle in light of Michael Thompson’s rubbish theory. A further article in development, which examines a broader set of Raabe’s texts, reads the depiction of caloric energy, primarily though not exclusively in the form of sugar, and the development of finance discourse in his literary texts as a representation of capitalist surplus and which signals the globalizing trends of trade, both of which intersect with imperial and colonial practices and systems of mobility.He is also a highly engaged teacher, who is enjoying instructing a variety of classes at Wake Forest University. This semester, he is the teacher for GER 153, a third-semester language class focused on the theme of the former East Germany, and for two sections of GES 340, an English-language culture class, the first of which is focus on “Catastrophe and Critique” and the second of which is about the German  environmental imagination.