Bethany Wiggin is the Founding Director of the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities. Her research interests lie in the intersections between the early modern period and contemporary theoretical concerns, including global and transnational literature, translation and multilingualism, and the environmental humanities. While grounded in the cultural and political landscape of central Europe and the North Atlantic, her has work increasingly charted global trajectories. She began co-organizing two conferences for 2016-17 and events exploring gatherings of research across the arts and sciences and public engagement in the environmental humanities: Timescales in October and An Ecotopian Toolkit to come in April. Since the U.S. election, she has played a pivotal role in launching #Datarefuge, a public and collaborative project designed to address concerns about federal climate and environmental data. Her talk focuses on the intersection between individual scholarly agendas and creative work with public humanities projects in the environmental humanities.
Organized by the Environmental Humanities Initiative [email protected]. Cosponsored by the River Life Program, the Institute on the Environment, the College of Liberal Arts Environmental Humanities Initiative, the Center for German and European Studies, the Consortium for the Study of the Premodern World, the Center for Early Modern History, and the Departments of Asian Language & Literatures; English; and German, Scandinavian & Dutch.
Bethany Wiggin (Associate Professor, Department of German Languages and Literatures, University of Pennsylvania) has published Novel Translations: The European Novel and the German Book, 1680-1730 (2011) and is co-editor with Catriona MacLeod of Un/Translatables: New Maps for Germanic Literatures (2016). A second monograph, Germanopolis: Utopia Found and Lost in Penn's Woods, 1683-1763, is under contract. In 2014-15, Wiggin was a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies at the LMU in Munich, where she was also affiliated with the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. In 2016-17, she is directing the Penn Humanities Forum's year on Translation.