Ellwood Wiggins (he/him/his)

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 came out with Bucknell University Press in 2019. 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,  Shaftesbury, Mendelssohn, Lessing, Adam Smith, Goethe, Kleist, 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.