I'm Holly Wiegand, Assistant Professor of English at Indiana Wesleyan University.

I received my Ph.D. in English Literature from Boston University in 2025.

I am a dedicated teacher and scholar of 19th-century transatlantic literature and culture, women's studies, poetry, videogame studies, literature and religion, the novel, and more. I take an interdisciplinary lens connecting the past to our present.

I seek to model and foster collaboration, curiosity, and compassion in all my work.

My dissertation project, “Bold Devotion: Female Religious Authority and Transatlantic 19th-Century Fiction,” recovers the sophisticated work and words of real and fictional women preachers, writers, and theologians of the 19th century. I'm scheduled to defend spring 2025.

My work has appeared or is forthcoming in Legacy, ESQ, Brontë Studies, and in the edited collection Victorians and Videogames with Routledge. I have extensive conference experience, and I'm also a current editor for Ampersand: An American Studies Journal out of BU's American & New England Studies Program.

I'm currently teaching a first-year Literature Core course at Boston College called "Close Encounters: Science Fiction and the Self from Novels to Games." This class introduces students to past and present SF fiction, film, and games. Reading H.G. Wells, Ted Chiang, Ursula K. Le Guin, Nnedi Okorafor, and others, I center students’ experiences with sci-fi pop culture and how we talk about real sci-fi phenomena like AI. To quote Kenneth Burke, students see how literature offers us “equipment for living” with AI by presenting a range of narratives, outcomes, and questions beyond university settings.

When I'm not reading and writing, I enjoy indoor rock climbing, kayaking, Montana downhill skiing, cooking, playing videogames, watercolor painting, and making runs to Blackbird Doughnuts in Boston.