Matthew Childs

E-Mail: childsm@wfu.edu

Matthew Childs is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of German and Russian at Wake Forest University. He is a scholar of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German literature and intellectual history, the environmental humanities, and race and imperialism in the German context. His current projects include Catastrophe and Critique: A Dialectic of German Modernity, a book which focuses on the development of the catastrophe concept and its relationship to critique in intellectual and literary discourses from 1755 to Walter Benjamin’s suicide; Race and Germany, co-authored with Prof. Jonathan Warren (University of Washington), that examines the history and contemporary discursive trends of race in Germany; and Critical Catastrophe Studies, a volume co-edited with Christoph Weber (University of North Texas) that brings together contributions from scholars around the world to discuss the intersection of catastrophe and critique and its implications for contemporary issues.