Justin Wigard

Biography

Justin Wigard is a PhD candidate in the Department of English, where he works with and teaches popular culture, game studies, comic studies, children’s literature, and digital humanities in the literature classroom. His work covers a wide range of subjects, including the Hallmark Channel’s Garage Sale Mystery film series (co-written with fellow grad student Mitch Ploskonka); professional wrestling and Street Fighter; chronotopal representations of feminism in Marvel’s Jessica Jones; the visual rhetoric of dinosaurs in Calvin and Hobbes; monstrous motherhood in Neil Gaiman’s Coraline; and digital visualizations of early-Modern Mughal biographies. Justin’s dissertation focuses on utilizing, and developing, video games as learning tools within the classroom.