Nicole A. Spigner Joins Department as Assistant Professor
May 1, 2019
The department would like to extend a warm welcome to Nicole A. Spigner, who will be joining our faculty this fall as an assistant professor.
Dr. Spigner is a 2018-19 Woodrow Wilson Fellow and will join NU’s African American Studies Department from Columbia College Chicago, where she has held the position of Assistant Professor of African American Literature and Culture in the English and Creative Writing Department. Currently living in Denver, she is dedicating her fellowship time to her manuscript: Niobe Repeating: Black New Women and Ovidian Transformation. Niobe Repeating examines feminine transformation in the works of Black New Women classicists who rewrote stories from Ovid's Metamorphoses and employed Ovidian allusions, themes, and forms. Furthermore, Niobe Repeating analyzes works by Phillis Wheatley, Pauline E. Hopkins, H. Cordelia Ray, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson that illuminate the precarious yet ever-evolving positions inhabited by black mothers in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Dr. Spigner completed her PhD at Vanderbilt University, and her M.A. and B.A. degrees at University of Pennsylvania. Specializing in the 19th Century, she also engages with and teaches classes featuring black feminist and feminist theories, 19th-century American literature, Afrofuturism and black speculative fiction, syncretic religion in the Americas and 20th-century black literatures. Additionally, she serves on the boards of Issues in Critical Investigation and the A-Line Journal. Her work is forthcoming in Brill’s Companion to Classical Reception in the Early Americas, and can also be found in the A-Line Journal, Public Books, and The Feminist Wire. In addition to her academic pursuits, Dr. Spigner enjoys clay throwing and hand building, highly-seasoned vegetarian cooking, as well as long walks on the beach with her rescue Shar-Pei mix, Neoma.