Caroline Wigginton is Chair and Professor of English. She is a literary, cultural, and book historian who specializes in the study of American literatures, Native American and Indigenous Studies, and book history and material texts. She also teaches courses in gender studies, Indigenous cartographies, and health humanities.
Research Interests
- American Literatures to 1900
- Native American and Indigenous Studies
- Book History and Material Texts
- The Transatlantic 18th Century
- Ecological and Craftwork Formalisms
- The Native Southeast
Biography
Caroline Wigginton is Chair and Professor of English. She is a literary, cultural, and book historian who specializes in the study of American literatures, Native American and Indigenous Studies, and book history and material texts. She also teaches courses in gender studies, Indigenous cartographies, and health humanities.
Wigginton’s scholarship has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, Huntington Library, the Newberry Library, Princeton University, Winterthur Museum, and the Bibliographical Society of America. Her research has received awards from the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, the William and Mary Quarterly, the Society of Early Americanists, and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. She received the Early American Literature Book Prize, awarded for In the Neighborhood in 2018. She is currently at work on two books, the first a study of Indigenous literary and material aesthetics and forms as they developed in the long nineteenth century and the second literary and scientific history of Native ornithologists and their writings.
Wigginton has been Chair of English since January 2021. She is also Executive Coordinator of the Society of Early Americanists.
Publications
In this innovative work at the intersection of Indigenous studies, literary studies, book history, and material culture studies, Caroline Wigginton tells a story of the interweavings of Native craftwork and American literatures from their ancient roots to the present. Focused primarily on North America, especially the colonized lands and waters now claimed by the United States, this book argues for the foundational but often-hidden aesthetic orientation of American literary history toward Native craftwork. Wigginton knits this narrative to another of Indigenous aesthetic repatriation through the making and using of books and works of material expression. Ultimately, she reveals that Native craftwork is by turns the warp and weft of American literature, interwoven throughout its long history.
Other Books
In the Neighborhood: Women’s Publication in Early America (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016)
Edited Books
The Sovereignty and Goodness of God: A Broadview Anthology Edition with Text and Contexts, by Mary Rowlandson, co-edited with Birgit Brander Rasmussen (Broadview Press, forthcoming)
Feeling Godly: Religious Affections and Christian Contact in Early North America, co-edited and co-introduced with Abram Van Engen (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021)
Transatlantic Feminisms in the Age of Revolutions, co-edited with Joanna M. Brooks and Lisa L. Moore (Oxford University Press, 2012)
Journal Issues
“A Joint Forum on Materials and Methods in Native American and Indigenous Studies,” co-edited with Alyssa Mt. Pleasant and Kelly Wisecup, William and Mary Quarterly 75.2 (2018), 207-342 and Early American Literature 53.2 (2018), 404-537.
Select Recent Essays
“Northeastern Native Space,” Oxford Handbook to Anne Bradstreet, ed. by Abram Van Engen and Mary Eyring (forthcoming)
“Indigenous Contexts,” Phillis Wheatley (Peters) In Context, edited by Wendy R. Roberts and April C.E. Langley, Cambridge University Press (forthcoming)
“Brief Stories from the Long History of Indigenous American Artists’ Books,” Gatherings: New Directions in Indigenous Book History, ed. by Amy Gore and Daniel Radus University of Pennsylvania Press (in press)
“‘All stories have ancestors’: A Conversation on Ethical Relations with Joy Harjo,” Special Issue on Ethical Relations in Indigenous Literary Studies, Studies in American Indian Literatures (forthcoming)
“Reading with Indigenous Form: Lucy Tantaquidgeon Tecomwas’s Moccasins (ca. 1767),” Special Issue on Craft, edited by Jennifer Y. Chuong and Sarah Grandin, Journal18: A Journal of Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture 18 (Fall 2024), https://www.journal18.org/7566
“Hymncraft: Joseph Johnson, Thomas Commuck, and the Composition of Song and Community from the Native Northeast to Brothertown,” Native American and Indigenous Studies 8.1 (2021), 19-55
“A Storied Place: Jonathan Carver’s Travel Narrative and the Indigenous Map of the Upper Mississippi River Valley,” American Literature 92.1 (2020), 1-31
“An Indigenous Pipe Bibliography,” The Unfinished Book, ed. by Alexandra Gillespie and Deidre Lynch (Oxford University Press, 2020: 272-88)
“Completing the Turn,” Introduction to a Joint Forum on Materials and Methods in Native American and Indigenous Studies, co-written with Alyssa Mt. Pleasant and Kelly Wisecup, William and Mary Quarterly 75.2 (2018), 207-36 and Early American Literature 53.2 (2018), 407-44
Courses Taught
- ENGL 3091 Studies in Literature and Health: Sick Women
- ENG 775 Studies in American Literary Realism: Native Literatures of the Mississippi River Valley
- ENG 220 Survey in Literary History: Text as Technology
- ENG 359 Survey of Native American Literatures
- ENG 435 Transatlantic Literature to 1900: Literature and the Body in the Long Eighteenth Century
- ENG 760 Studies in Early American Literature: Early American Materialities
- Honors 1010 Self and Society
- Honors 1020 Self and Cosmos
Education
M.A. English, The University of Texas at Austin (2005)
Ph.D. English, The University of Texas at Austin (2010)
B.A. English, Ohio State University (1998)
B.S. Biochemistry, Ohio State University (1998)