Matthew Childs (he/him/his)

Matthew Childs is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Germanics. He joined the department in 2015 having completed his M.A. in German Studies as well as his B.A. in German Studies and Classical Civilization at Florida State University. He will be a Teaching Assistant for the 2019–20 academic year and will be teaching beginning and intermediate level German courses. He has also been awarded the Hanauer Fellowship for Excellence in Western Civilizations for the 2019–20 academic year.  

Matthew's dissertation project (title to be determined) looks at the form and function of disasters, both natural and human-caused, in several works of German literature of the 19th Century: Das Erdbeben in Chili by Heinrich von Kleist, Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Pfisters Mühle: Ein Sommerferienheft by Wilhelm Raabe, and Der Schimmelreiter by Theodor Storm. The goal is to use these disasters as a means to determine contemporaneous attitudes towards such things as morality, ethics, ecology, the human, and more.