Ross Shields

Ross Shields (Ph.D., Columbia University) teaches German language courses alongside a range of seminars that include “Introduction to Literary Modernism: Words are Hard,” “Culture and the Capital: Berlin and Vienna,” and “Critical Ecologies” (cross-listed with Environmental Studies).

His research focuses on German literature and intellectual history from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, with particular interests in aesthetics and theories of perception, morphology and the history and philosophy of science, modernism and the interarts, and ecocriticism and environmental thought. He has published numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, including “From Climate Models to Climate Fiction: Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future as Operative Literature” (in Breaking and Making Models, 2025), “The Piecemeal Coherence of Kafka’s Alchimistengasse Notebooks” (Monatshefte, 2023), “Morphology and Music Theory” (in Aus dem Leben der Form II, Wallstein, 2021), “Zusammenhang (Nexus)” (Goethe-Lexicon of Philosophical Concepts, 2021), and “Wittgenstein on Music and Language” (Germanic Review, 2018). He is also a co-editor of a special issue of The Germanic Review, “Ecology before Nature: From the Nexus of Things to the Web of Life” (2026). His first book, Morphology as Critique: From Kant’s Fiction to Goethe’s Science, is forthcoming from Cornell University Press.

Before joining Macalester in 2023, Shields lived in Berlin, Germany, where he held residencies and postdocs at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies, the Leibniz-Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL), and the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. He served as guest faculty at Bard College Berlin, where he acted as project leader of the Science and Religion Project from 2021–2022.