OFFICIAL WEBSITE OF WENDY C. NIELSEN
Scholar and Writer
Upcoming Talk: Audre Lorde’s Phenomenology of Self-Care Remedies
Thursday, September 19, 2025–11am EST
at Lehigh University and on Zoom
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: Public Classes & Performance
-
10/29/25 & 11/3/25 at Montclair Public Library, NJ, 6:15pm
-
Performance on 11/3/25 in Madison, NJ, 2pm
Register here
BIO
Wendy C. Nielsen earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis and is currently Professor of English at Montclair State University. Her interest in solving why certain figures recur in British, French, and German literature and culture is exemplified in the books Women Warriors in Romantic Drama and Motherless Creations: Fictions of Artificial Life, 1650-1890. She has published scholarly essays on world literature, Romantic-era automata, theater, the French Revolution, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Olympe de Gouges, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elizabeth Inchbald, Charlotte Corday, and Boadicea.
MOTHERLESS CREATIONS: FICTIONS OF ARTIFICIAL LIFE, 1650-1890
Wendy C. Nielsen's most recent book examines motherless creations in American, British, French, and German literature: Pygmalion’s statue, Frankenstein’s creature, homunculi, automata, androids, golems, and steam men. This book explains the elimination of maternal characters in Western speculative fiction before 1890.
.jpg)
Courtesy of The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, New York Public Library Digital Collections. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/2a1096e0-2289-0132-b3b6-58d385a7bbd0
.jpg)
A satire of two alchemists
ONLINE SCHOLARLY PROFILES
If I had to define life in one word . . . I would say: Life is creation.
Claude Bernard
