Alexander Phillips

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.