Jana Tigchelaar

Jana Tigchelaar serves as Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of English at Marshall University, concurrently directing the Graduate Program. Her academic profile centers on American literary traditions with specialized expertise in regionalist and gender-focused scholarship.

Education:

• PhD in English, University of Kansas (2013)
• MA in English, Ohio University (2007)
• BA in English and Art, Trinity Christian College (2000)

Dr. Tigchelaar's research interrogates how nineteenth-century American women writers employed regional literature to negotiate power structures through narrative revision and neighborly reconciliation. Her book project Regional Revisions: Women’s Regionalist Literature and the Project of Neighborly Reconciliation argues that regional texts model community-based national identity as an alternative to exclusionary individualism. Current work explores queer liminality in Freeman's ghost stories and kinship dynamics in Appalachian fiction through ecocritical and anthropomorphic lenses.

Her publications consistently examine gift economies, spectral representations, and community formation across American women's writing. Analyzing authors from Jewett to Wharton, she reveals how literature challenges dominant social narratives through localized reconciliation models and subversive economic frameworks.

In pedagogy, Dr. Tigchelaar guides students in deconstructing sociocultural forces shaping literary production through courses including African American Slave Narrative, Gothic American Literature, and Appalachian Literature, emphasizing critical interrogation of power dynamics in textual traditions.