Bethany Wiggin

2024-2025 Barron Visiting Professor in the Environmental Humanities

 

Biography

Bethany Wiggin joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania as an Assistant Professor in 2003 and was promoted to Professor in 2022. Working with students, she founded the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities (PPEH) in 2015, and she served as Founding  Director until 2024. Her primary appointment is in the Department of French, Italian, and Germanic Languages and Literatures, and at Penn she also serves on the graduate groups in Comparative Literature and English and International Studies at the Lauder Institute. Her books and essays explore histories of trade, migration and settler colonialism; multilingualism and cultural translation; and environmental change in the Atlantic world and has appeared in publications from the PMLA to Nature. She is now writing Utopia Found and Lost in Penn’s Woods, an exploration of the multiethnic worlds European settler colonists attempted to build in the Delaware Valley and the ecological legacy of that historical chapter and its continuing reverberations. She is editor or co-editor of five books or special issues:

  • Enduring Harm: Unlikely Comparisons and Slow Violence in Mumbai and Philadelphia is now in production with the International Journal of Urban and Regional Relations, co-edited with PPEH project partners from Rising Waters: Philadelphia and Mumbai. 
  • Timescales: Ecological Temporalities across Disciplines, a co-edited book with PPEH alumnae (University of Minnesota Press, 2020)
  • Babel of the Atlantic (Penn State University Press, 2019)  
  • The Rise and Fall–or Fall and Rise?–of Monolingualism, a co-edited special issue of the German Studies Review 
  • Un/Translatables: New Maps for Germanic Cultures, a co-edited book (Northwestern University Press, 2016). 

Her first book, Novel Translations: The European Novel and the German Book (Cornell University Press, 2010), explored the emergence of commodity culture, fashion, and reading as a form of entertainment.

At Penn, she teaches environmental humanities courses including experimental cross-disciplinary seminars for undergraduates, such as Liquid Histories and Floating Archives (Anth 154, Coml 152, Engl 052, Envs 152, Grmn 152, Hist 152), Sustainability and Utopianism, and graduate seminars, including Environmental Humanities: Theory, Method, Practice and Public Environmental Humanities (for PPEH Fellows only). In 2021, with collaborators at the Universities of Oxford (UK) and Toronto (Canada), she began developing a consortia for graduate student training in the environmental humanities.

She is a founding member of BRIDGES, a UNESCO-MOST alliance for sustainability science, incorporated by UNESCO in April 2021. She currently serves on editorial boards including Global Challenges in Environmental Humanities, a book series published by Bloomsbury, and Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities. She regularly reviews major collaborative grants (University of Texas, Planet Texas, University of Minnesota, Grand Challenges Program, University of Iowa, Institute for Interdisciplinary Graduate Training for Sustainability). She has been on many committees at the Modern Languages Association, and serves on several university and college committees at Penn, including two strategic committees in SAS. She also chairs the task force in the College at Penn on ecological and climate literacy in the liberal arts. She has held a Weiler Research Fellowship from Penn and the Deans’ Distinguished Visiting Fellowship at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine. She has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, received a Whiting Public Engagement Fellowship, and in 2017 received a Science Defender award from the Union of Concerned Scientists.

She is committed to the right to research as a human right and writes and speaks regularly to both academic and broader public audiences that have ranged from 8th-grade classrooms to the Philadelphia City Council to committees of the U.S Congress. In 2020, she initiated a public research and engagement project on climate storytelling, My Climate Story https://my-climate-story.org/. In 2022, she co-founded a new research project, Intersecting Energy Cultures, which responds to the urgent need to incorporate community-driven solutions in the just transition away from fossil fuels https://intersectingenergycultures.org/

More about her research and teaching, including course syllabuses, may be found on her personal website @ https://bethanywiggin.org/