Bethany Wiggin

Bethany Wiggin joined the faculty at Penn in 2003 and is an Associate Professor of German and affiliated faculty in the Program in Comparative Literature and the Department of English. She is also the Founding Director of the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities (PPEH).

Her books and essays explore histories of migration, language, multilingualism, and cultural translation since the Columbian exchange across the Atlantic world, and her work has appeared in journals ranging from the PMLA to the journal Nature. At present, she is writing Utopia Found and Lost in Penn’s Woods, an exploration of the multiethnic worlds European settler colonists attempted to build in the Delaware Valley, sometimes in understanding with their Lenape neighbors, and the ways in which the ecological legacy of this historical chapter continue to reverberate into our present.