
Contact Information
Biography
My teaching and research are committed to understanding how people come to know one another and themselves. I am especially interested in how the reception of Greek antiquity and Shakespeare contribute to the formation of our ideas and identities today. In my courses, I work alongside students to explore urgent problems--such as sympathy, heroism, and revolution--through the lens of literature, performance, and philosophy.
My first book, Odysseys of Recognition: Performing Intersubjectivity in Homer, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Kleist (Bucknell UP 2019) has been generously reviewed in Modern Language Quarterly, German Quarterly, German Studies Review, Goethe Yearbook, and Lessing Yearbook. My second book project is a study of the rhetoric of sympathy in ethics and aesthetics through the reception of the Philoctetes myth from the Trojan to the Iraq Wars. I have also published articles on Sophocles, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Shaftesbury, Mendelssohn, Lessing, Adam Smith, Goethe, Lenz, Schiller, Kleist, W.E.B. Du Bois, Tom Stoppard, Heiner Müller, Ursula Krechel, and the Sanskrit dramatist Kālidāsa. Together with Martin Wagner, I translated selected plays, stories, essays, and poems of the daring Sturm und Drang writer, J.M.R. Lenz (2019). I am also interested in connections between evolutions in scientific understanding and artistic creation, and my translation of Rüdiger Campe’s The Game of Probability: Literature and Calculation between Pascal and Kleist, was published by Stanford UP in 2013. All of my sundry interests unfold from some aspect of performance studies: it is instructively revealing to view even the scientific experiment as a staged performative space.
Before coming coming to UW, I taught at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and the Priamursky State University Shalom Aleichem in Birobidzhan, Russia.
Research
Selected Research
- Ellwood Wiggins, "The Tragic Idealism of Double Consciousness: W.E.B. Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk and Friedrich Schiller's Naive and Sentimental Poetry," Monatshefte 115/3 (2023): 344-64.
- Ellwood Wiggins, “The Latent Radicalism of Aristotle and J.M.R. Lenz,” German Life and Letters, 76.1 (2023): 150-172. Download PDF
- Ellwood Wiggins and Martin Wagner. “Radical and Moderate Sturm und Drang.” Introduction to Special Issue of German Life and Letters, 76.1 (2023): 1-20. Download PDF
- Ellwood Wiggins, "Stage of Exception: Politics and Theater in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida," Early Modern Literary Studies 22:2 (2022). [https://journals.shu.ac.uk/index.php/EMLS/article/view/303] Download PDF
- Wiggins, Ellwood. "The Moral Aesthetic of the Scream: Sophocles' Philoctetes and the Hidden Structure of Lessing's Laokoon." Lessing Yearbook 51 (2024): 51-71. Download PDF
- Wiggins, Ellwood. "The Transatlantic Origins of Double Consciousness: W.E.B. Du Bois in Germany." Transatlantic Literary History (blog). WWU Münster. October 14, 2021. https://medium.com/transatlanticism-wwu/the-transatlantic-origins-of-double-consciousness-w-e-b-du-bois-in-germany-93ceb656c222
- Ellwood Wiggins, "Enduring Myth: The Survival of the Unfit in Sophocles, Heiner Müller, Ursula Krechel, and Hans Blumenberg," The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 95:2 (2020): 94-113. Download PDF
- Ellwood Wiggins, Odysseys of Recognition: Performing Intersubjectivity in Homer, Aristotle, Shakespere, Goethe, and Kleist (Bucknell UP: Lewisberg, PA, 2019),
- Wiggins, Ellwood. "Reflecting and Performing Selves: The Fate of Recognition in Kleist's Penthesilea." German Studies Review 41, no. 2 (2018): 253-74. Download PDF
- Ellwood Wiggins, "The Myth of Tragedy: Fictions of Dialogue in Mendelssohn's Letters on the Sentiments and Shaftesbury's The Moralists," Lessing Yearbook/Jahrbuch, XLIII (2016): 35-54. Download PDF
- Ellwood Wiggins, "Cold War Compassion: The Politics of Pity in Tom Stoppard’s Neutral Ground and Heiner Müller’s Philoktet," Literatur für Leser, 4-15 (2015): 255-269. Download PDF
- Ellwood Wiggins, "Pity Play: Sympathy and Spectatorship in Lessing’s Miss Sara Sampson and Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments," in Performing Knowledge, 1750-1850. Ed. Mary Helen Dupree and Sean B. Franzel. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2015. 85-112. Download PDF
- Ellwood Wiggins, "Kleist's Four Causes: Narration and Etiology in Das Erdbeben in Chili" MLN 130.3 (2015): 580-606. Download PDF
- Sympathy for the Devil: The Rhetoric of Compassion (German 390), Team Learning Projects, 2014
- Ellwood Wiggins, “Depicting Artist and Viewer: Performed Aesthetics in Kālidāsa’s Śakuntalā,” The International Journal of the Arts in Society, 6/6 (Sept. 2012): 179-192. Download PDF
- Ellwood Wiggins, trans. Rüdiger Campe's The Game of Probability: Literature and Calculation from Pascal to Kleist. Stanford University Press: 2013. 504 pp.