Holly Wiegand

I am a dedicated teacher and scholar of 19th-century transatlantic literature and culture. I’m completing my dissertation, “Bold Devotion: Female Religious Authority and Transatlantic 19th-Century Fiction,” under the direction of Anna Henchman and Laura Korobkin with plans to defend spring 2024. I earned the Graduate Certificate in Teaching Writing in 2022, and my graduate work received the 2023 BU Center of the Humanities Clarimond Mansfield Award and Angela J. and James J. Rallis Memorial Award.

My research and teaching attend to interdisciplinary 19th-century topics, namely:
women’s studies, African-American studies, literature and religion, the novel, and literature and videogames. “Later-Born Theresas” fills in the gaps in women’s religious participation and preaching in mid-century history. I examine how fictional and nonfictional Protestant women preachers navigated a hostile society by cultivating alternative female-centered communities and theologies that looked to their spiritual foremothers and sisters.

Please see my personal website here.

Education: 
M.A., English, Boston University
B.S., English, Corban University
Ph.D., English, Boston University, expected 2024

Publications:

“Women in the Work(s): Race and Minorness in The Gates Ajar and Work,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers. Forthcoming.

“Dickinson on the Surface: Contemporary Children’s Editions of Dickinson and the Board-Book Canon,” Ampersand: An American Studies Journal, vol. 2, no 3. Link here.

“80 Days, 80 Plays: Victorian Curiosity as Antidote to Empire in inkle Studio’s 80 Days,” in Victorians and Videogames, ed. by S. Brooke Cameron and Lin Young. Routledge, expected 2024.

Conference Presentations:

“Emily’s Surfaces: Contemporary Dickinson Children’s Picture Books and the Board-Book Canon,” Emily Dickinson International Society panel, American Literature Association (ALA). Chicago, IL. May 2024.

“Shifting Sympathies: Realism, Representation, and the Reception of Eliot’s Devout Heroines,” Midwest Victorian Studies Association (MVSA). Iowa City, IA. April 2024.

“Bridging New and Old Poetic Canons in the Classroom,” Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) Annual Convention. Boston, MA. March 2024.

“Victorian Women’s Theology in Conversation: Transatlantic Feminist Hermeneutics and Community in Shirley and The Minister’s Wooing,” Midwest Victorian Studies Association Summer Seminar, September 2023.

“Rewriting Her Stories: 19th-Century Scripture Biographies by and for Women,” Northeast Modern Language Association Annual Convention, March 2023.

“Man and/as His Dog: Canines, Class, and Reform in Middlemarch,” British Women Writers Conference, May 2022.

“Reading Failure and Failing to Read in Disco Elysium,” Northeast Modern Language Association Convention, Baltimore, March 2022.

“‘They did more than to pour out tea’: Black Women Preachers and Their Communities in 19th-Century America,” Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association, November 2021.

“Playing Jane(s): Narrative Multiplicity and Community in Video Game Adaptations of Austen,” Modern Language Association Annual Convention, January 2021.   

“Living Gothic Spaces: Reconsidering the Bleak House Dark Plates,” International #Dickens150 Virtual Conference, June 2020.

“Shaftesbury, Fielding, and the Question of Right Ridicule,” The Conference for Christianity and Literature, Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, March 2019.

Courses Designed & Taught:
WR120: Ready Player Reader: Literary Videogames and Narrative, fall 2023

EN142: Introduction to Poetry, spring 2022

EN120: Writing Women in 19th-Century America, fall 2021

WR150: Literatures of Social Change 1850-Present, spring 2021

WR120: 19th-Century Writing for Social Change, fall 2020