Bethany Wiggin is the Founding Director of the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities and an Associate Professor of German. Her scholarship explores histories of migration, ecology, language and cultural translation since the Columbian exchange on both sides of the Atlantic world.
18th – early 20th century literature, comparative literature, aesthetic theory, German-Jewish writing.
English and Italian culture from 1100-1600; also, Flemish/Dutch, French, German, and Spanish, premodern women, Chaucer, European romance. Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Afra Behn, "Periodizing Women," JMEMS, 36.2.; Currently editing a literary history of Europe, 1348-1418.
Russian and Czech literature, semiotics, structuralism. Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics.
Victorian and modernist literature, with special interests in the novel, law, trauma, and visual culture studies. The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination (Cornell UP, 2003).
18th-century German literature, art, history of medicine, queer theory and gender studies.
Film theory, war and the academy, violence and media, community media, animation theory, feminism and terrorism, death penalty photography, the relationship between cinema and contemporary art, and cinematic tempo.