Other links:

Other links:

Alexander Phillips

Assistant Professor of English,
Director of the MA programme, Ashoka University

Ph.D. Cornell University

Alexander Phillips is Assistant Professor of English at Ashoka University. He holds a PhD in German Studies from Cornell University. He earned his Masters in German Studies from Cornell University and Bachelors in Comparative Literature and German Studies from the University of California, Irvine. He was a DAAD fellow at the Humboldt University in Berlin.

He is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled Poetics, Politics, and the Conquest of Nature: Ecology and German Realism. The book is an exploration of eco-aesthetic reflection in German-language literature from the second half of the nineteenth century. It argues that environmental degradation also drives the texts’ reflections on literature and art. Dr. Phillips’s work on ecology and literature has appeared in the journal Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment and the volume German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene

Like many other ecocritics, Dr. Phillips is unabashedly enthusiastic about exploring the real landscapes that are the subject of his reading and writing, preferably while perched on a bicycle saddle.

Dr. Phillips’s research interests include Ecocriticism and Environmental Humanities, Realist Literature and Theories of Realism, Frankfurt School and Critical Theory, and German Literature of the Nineteenth to Twenty-First centuries.

  • “Reviewing Realism: Theodor Fontane on Media and the Work of Art” in Market Strategies: German Literature and Publication Cultures in the Long Nineteenth Century, pp. 97-117 (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2020)
  • “Environmental Depredation and Aesthetic Reflection in Wilhelm Raabe’s Late Fiction” in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 24.4, pp. 1-27 (2017)
  • “Adalbert Stifter’s Alternative Anthropocene: Reimagining Social Nature in Brigitta and Abdias” in German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene, eds. Caroline Schaumann and Heather Sullivan, pp. 65-85 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)
  • “Cheerful Terror: Adalbert Stifter and the Aesthetics of Atmosphere.” In A Companion to the Works of Adalbert Stifter, ed. Sean Ireton (Camden House, Forthcoming 2024).
  • “Kunst, Kritik, und Zeitungseilfertigkeit: Mediale Reflexionen in Theodor Fontanes Buch- und Theaterrezensionen.” Fontanes Medien, edited by Peer Trilcke. 97-109. Berlin: DeGruyter, 2022.
  • “Fantastic Consumption and the Utopia of Self-Cannibalism in Ludwig Tieck’s Des Lebens Überfluß.” The German Quarterly, 95, no 3 (Summer 2022): 260-275.
  • The Country and the City: Beyond the Urban/Rural Divide

  • Climate Fiction

  • Conquests of Nature

  • From the Fairy Tale to the Uncanny

  • Introduction to Literary Theory

Study at Ashoka

Study at Ashoka

    [current_url]