Bio
Matthew Childs earned his Ph.D. in German Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle and his B.A. and M.A. in German at Florida State University.
He has two areas of research. The first is situated in the environmental humanities, where he concentrates 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.”
Under the umbrella of the environmental humanities, Matthew also attends to the topic of energy, or the energy humanities. He is interested in the relationship between energy’s physical forms/properties and its metaphorical or symbolic significances. Sugar is of particular importance. A recent article with On_Culture considers Wilhelm Raabe’s “Pfisters Mühle” in light of Michael Thompson’s rubbish theory, with the story’s finance discourse, centered on investment in a sugar refinery, evidencing a shift in societal values. A further article in development, which examines a broader set of Raabe’s texts, argues that his novels theorize capitalist surplus through depictions of caloric energy in connection with imperialism and colonialism.
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 understated critique of such systems. A full-length article version of this forum contribution is currently in the works. 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.
He is also a highly engaged teacher who is enjoying instructing a variety of classes at Wake Forest University. This spring semester, he is teaching GER 153 “Deutschland (heute)”, GER 318 “The World is in Berlin”, and GES 340 “The Measure of Man: Race/ism and Germany.” His classes bring together highly contemporary issues and themes with innovative teaching practices, including the use of new teaching technologies like artificial intelligence. He is currently preparing a paper on the topic of using Google Notebook LM in a third-year German conversational language course as well as, in a separate paper, the utility of the same AI program for writing exercises in intermediate-level German courses.
Education
Ph.D. University of Washington