Biography:

Jon Hegglund spent his earliest years moving around the United States before settling in the San Francisco Bay Area at the age of eight.  He received his BA, MA, and PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara, leaving the coastal paradise in 1998. He then taught for four years at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, CT, before coming to WSU in 2002.

Teaching Interests:

Hegglund teaches undergraduate courses in modernist and contemporary narrative, literary theory, and film and new media studies.  His graduate seminars have included “Anthropocene Literature and Culture,” “New Theories of Narrative,” “Nonhuman Modernisms,” “Modernism and Film,” and “Theories of Space and Place in Literature and Culture.”

Research Interests:

Hegglund is broadly interested in the intersections between materialist ecocriticism and narratology in modernist and contemporary narratives. He is currently researching cognitive approaches to narrating non- and posthuman characters, focusing on media including prose fiction, graphic fiction, and film/television. He is also a staff writer at Baseball Prospectus.

Recent and Forthcoming Publications:

Books

World Views: Metageographies of Modernist Fiction (Oxford UP, 2012). Nominated for MLA First Book Award.

Modernism and the Anthropocene (edited with John McIntyre). (Lexington Books, forthcoming).

Articles and Book Chapters

“Unnatural Narratology and Weird Realism in Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation.” Environment and Narrative, Eds. Erin James and Eric Morel (Ohio State UP, forthcoming).

“A Home for the Anthropocene: Planetary Time and Domestic Space in Richard McGuire’s Here.” Literary Geographies special issue on “Mobilizing Home(s)” (forthcoming).

“Lost in the Stacks: Shipping Containers and Narrative Agency in the Posthuman City.” Urban Transformations in the USA: Spaces, Communities, Representations, Ed. Julia Sattler (New York: Transcript Verlag/Columbia UP, 2016):

“Objects in Bloom.” Prospero. Rivista di letterature e culture 18 (2013): 23-40.

“The Ambient Narratives of Patrick Keiller: Screen Ecologies of Late Modernity.”  ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature and the Environment 20.2 (Spring 2013): 274-95. (“Editor’s Choice” essay)

Works in Progress:

“Anthropomorphics: Fictional Character in a Posthuman Age.” Book MS in progress.

“Narrative Approaches to Urban Space.” Article in partnership with grant project, “Scripts for Postindustrial Urban Futures: American Models, Transatlantic Intervention.” Funded by Volkswagen Foundation. (Primary researchers Jens-Martin Gurr and Barbara Buchenau, Ruhr-Universität Bochum).