WENDY C. NIELSEN

Wendy C. Nielsen, Ph.D. became a Professor of English at Montclair State University because she loves learning. Although Wendy teaches science fiction, comparative literature, and Medical Humanities in New Jersey, in her free time at home in Brooklyn, she is also a student herself (of Pilates, Buddhism, Tai Chi, cat care, and Narrative Medicine). Her scholarly research has focused on the recurrence of popular figures in Western cultural history. Women Warriors in Romantic Drama (University of Delaware Press, 2012) explored female assassins, soldiers, and feminists associated with the French Revolution such as Charlotte Corday and Olympe de Gouges. Motherless Creations: Fictions of Artificial Life, 1650-1890 (Routledge, 2022, out in paperback in Dec. 2023) examines Pygmalion’s statue, Frankenstein’s creature, homunculi, automata, androids, golems, and steam men as part of the literary genealogy of transhumanism in American, British, French, and German literature. Wendy has also written on Boadicea, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in leading academic journals. Her current research project addresses the impact of race on narratives about healing, how constructed communities function in women writers’ illness narratives, and why humans seek to blame people when they become ill.  

COURSES TAUGHT

"Frankenstein", Race, and Technology:
Imagining a Transhuman Future: Designer Children and ALife in Octavia Butler and Kazuo Ishiguro