Bethany Wiggin received her B.A. from Swarthmore College and her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. Her interests lie in the intersections between the early modern period and contemporary theoretical concerns including gender and postcolonial studies.

Recent publications include articles on eighteenth-century German American colonials, the emergence of consumer culture in Europe, the invention of fashion, German coffee consumption, and poet Andreas Gryphius.

Her transnational cultural history of the early German novel, Novel Translations: The European Novel and the German Book, 1680-1730, is forthcoming from Cornell University Press.

At present she is charting the planetary circulation of slave and captivity narratives, part of a project exploring early modern globalism and the vagaries of cultural translation, "Germanopolis (1683-1763): Postcolonial Figures in Colonial American History".  

Recent courses and seminars include graduate seminars on the "Theory and Practice of the Novel," "Foreign Exchanges," "Writing Amerika," and "Baroque Models of Authority." For first-year graduate students, she also regularly teaches the proseminar "German Literature to the Eighteenth Century." She has taught undergraduate classes on German Orientalisms, Present Pasts, and "Censored!"

In the fall semester 2009, Prof. Wiggin is teaching German Literature to the Eighteenth Century (Ger 531) and an Introduction to German Culture (Ger 269) for all German majors and minors.

updated 09-2009