Rebecca
Wigginton
Lecturer, Writing & Communication
Area of Study
Writing & Communication
Bio
My research focuses on Victorian psychiatry and notions of selfhood in the nineteenth-century novel; gothic studies and ecogothic literature; science fiction; young adult literature; and interdisciplinary approaches to first-year writing pedagogy. My current book project is a pre-history of neural science that explores the Victorian sleepwalker as a visible and sensational embodiment of a multivalent model of consciousness that was gradually accepted in nineteenth century medical, literary, and judicial circles. I’ve also published on religious syncretism in contemporary young adult gothic fiction, and have forthcoming work on ecogothic landscapes in nineteenth-century travelogues and literature on colonial Jamaica. I received my PhD in Cultural and Critical Studies from the University of Pittsburgh.