Lena Wånggren
Teaching Fellow; Tutor
- English Literature
Contact details
Address
- Street
-
50 George Square
- City
- Edinburgh
- Post code
- EH8 8LN
Background
Dr Lena Wånggren works as Teaching Fellow (Centre for Open Learning) and Tutor (Department of English Literature), teaching English and Scottish Literature, gender studies, and feminist writing. Her work is interdisciplinary, concerning gender, intersectionality and social justice in nineteenth-century and contemporary literature and culture. She has taught in UK universities for 15 years, with specific expertise in feminist, decolonial and antiracist pedagogies.
Lena's recent publications include articles on literary feminist utopias (Women's Writing, 2024) and nineteenth-century trade union fictions (VLC, 2024). Her current research project (funded by a Willison Trust Award) examines literary writings in nineteenth-century women's trade union periodicals. Earlier works include the books Gender, Technology and the New Woman (2017), which examines the links between gender, feminism and technology in late-Victorian writing, and the co-edited Corporeality and Culture: Bodies in Movement (2015), alongside articles, book chapters, and journal issues in literature and medicine, gender studies, pedagogy, Scottish literature, and labour studies.
As part of her work on equalities in the workplace, she recently obtained a UKRI grant (with Cecile Menard) for the project In Their Own Time: challenging conventional funding structures to include intersectionally underrepresented casualised academics, undertaken in the School of Geosciences. This project follows the co-authored (with Krista Bonello) monograph Working Conditions in a Marketised University System: Generation Precarity (2023), an intersectional study on casualisation and inequalities in UK universities.
Previously Lena has held research and teaching positions in English Literature at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (2014), Edinburgh Napier University (2016-2017), University of Glasgow (2017-2023), and University of Edinburgh (2009-). With expertise in EDI issues, she has researched and lectured on equalities in the workplace at Heriot-Watt University (2019-2023), and is currently the Director of EDI at the Centre for Open Learning.
Qualifications
PhD in English Literature (University of Edinburgh, 2012)
MSc in English Literature (University of Edinburgh, 2008)
BA (Hons) in Literary Studies (Stockholm University, 2007)
Undergraduate teaching
Literatures, Languages and Cultures
- Literary Studies 2A: English Literature in the World, 1380-1788
- Literary Studies 2B: English Literature in the World, post-1789
Centre for Open Learning
- Rooms of Their Own: Feminist Thought in Literature
- Gender and Sexuality in Literature
Research summary
Lena's research concerns questions of gender, intersectionality and social justice in nineteenth-century literature and culture, alongside interdisciplinary work on equalities in education and at work.
In nineteenth-century literary studies she works specifically on gender, intersectionality and science/technology/medicine, as seen in her monograph Gender, Technology and the New Woman (2017) and in a number of articles and book chapters. She co-edited (with Karin Sellberg and Kam Aghtan) the book Corporeality and Culture: Bodies in Movement (2015) on the relation between literature, culture and embodiment. She writes also on Scottish literature, pedagogy, feminist writing and history, and workplace equalities. She maintains an interest in material culture and book history, having been Research Fellow on a number of book history projects, including the New Edinburgh Edition of the Works of R L Stevenson (2011-2017), the Mehew Collection (2016-2017), The Stirling/South Carolina (S/SC) Edition of James Hogg (2018), and nineteenth-century periodicals (2020). Her current work focuses on nineteenth-century women's trade union periodicals.
She has co-edited a number of journal special issues, including (with Maja Milatovic) one on education, intersectionality and social justice, for the Journal of Feminist Scholarship (2015), and one on international education and educational rights, for the International Education Journal: Comparative Perspectives (2018). Previously, Lena co-edited a special issue of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies entitled 'Writing Bodies: Gender and Medicine in the Nineteenth Century' (July 2013), and a special issue of Somatechnics on technology and embodiment (Mar 2014).