SEA Featured Scholar, December 2025: Caroline Wigginton
How did you become interested in studying early American literature?
I began my doctoral program with an interest in twentieth-century transatlantic fiction and the history of science. However, in my second year, while feeling as if maybe grad school was a mistake, I took a seminar in early American Native literatures with Joanna Brooks. Her teaching as well as the literature and the avenues for meaningful research were energizing. As a result, I stayed to complete my degree, changing my focus to early American literatures.
Who is your favorite early American writer, or what is your favorite early American text, and why?
I don’t have favorites (just ask my children!), but I do have books I love to read, study, and teach. Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette and Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland are fantastic in the classroom and remain relevant to contemporary politics and culture. I find Samson Occom’s writings endlessly rich and nuanced, grounded as they are in Mohegan knowledge and kinship as well as Christian exegetical practice and his own wisdom as a community organizer and family man. One of the best things about being an early Americanist is that its literatures and peoples continue to surprise; there’s always more to read and learn.
What are you currently working on?
Birgit Brander Rasmussen and I have been working on an edition of Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative for Broadview for a while, and we’re nearing completion. We wanted an edition from the perspective of scholars of literature, Native studies, and gender studies. It will be exciting and rewarding to see our edition in the world and also to teach with it. I also have a several essays in progress, all loosely cohering around ideas of form in earlier Indigenous literatures and art. I have stacks of books on my desk, each related to a work-in-progress.
What is something you are reading right now (EAL related or otherwise) that inspires you, either personally or professionally?
I’ve just started reading my friend Sarah Mesle’s Reasons & Feelings: Writing for the Humanities Now (University of Chicago Press). It’s a timely book that begins by asking us why we write and explores how to find personal meaning and purpose in that practice. I’m also generally a voracious and indiscriminate reader, especially of fiction. For me, reading is a continual source of curiosity, empathy, and joy.
Is there a scholar in the field who inspires you, and why?
So many scholars inspire me, from my own mentors to those whose scholarship I read and cite to the emerging scholars who enter academia with bravery and creativity. The first name that came to mind, though, was Annette Kolodny. She wrote some of the first early Americanist scholarship that I read, back when I was an undergrad. It stuck with me, even when I thought I would never read any more early American literature or early Americanist scholarship. Then, years later while I was an assistant professor, I was on a conference panel with her. Though experiencing profoundly debilitating effects from many years of rheumatoid arthritis that restricted her mobility and speech, Professor Kolodny was still researching and writing and was doing so with boldness and enthusiasm. She was not only brilliant but generous and interested in everyone and everything around her. She passed away in 2019, but her career, scholarship, and life continue to inspire me.
Caroline Wigginton is Chair and Professor of English at the University of Mississippi.