معرفی
Jolene Zigarovich serves as Associate Professor of English in the Department of Languages and Literatures within the College of Humanities Arts and Sciences at the University of Northern Iowa. Her scholarly work critically examines intersections of law, literature, and embodied experience in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British fiction, with particular focus on gender, death, and queer/trans studies.
Education:
- PhD, Claremont Graduate University
- MA, Chapman University
- BA, California State University, Long Beach
Professor Zigarovich's research investigates how female bodies and emotions function as evidentiary forms within legal frameworks of the eighteenth century, arguing that narrative fiction frequently provided women with agency denied in actual court proceedings. Her scholarship bridges literary analysis with legal history, affect theory, and critical gender studies, revealing how novels reimagined birthright, inheritance, and economic power through female-centered narratives. This work consistently challenges normative legal structures while exploring alternative economies of identity and representation.
Her publications demonstrate a sustained engagement with the instrumentalization of the body in historical legal contexts, particularly examining how women navigated Chancery courts, will-plotting, and matriarchal economies through literary strategies. Recurring analytical threads include necropolitics in Victorian fiction, Gothic representations of sexuality, and the critique of biopolitical regulation across two centuries of British literature.
Scientific Awards and Fellowships:
- NIAS Fellow (Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, 2021-2022)
- Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh (2021)
Professor Zigarovich secured National Endowment for the Humanities support for her monograph Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (2023). While specific graduate advising details aren't publicly enumerated, her teaching portfolio includes advanced courses on eighteenth-century literature, women writers, Romanticism, and Gothic fiction. Current research involves two major book projects: Victorian Necropolitics: Legislating the Dead Body and the Novel, 1847-1874 and Legal Bodies: Women, Economies, and the Law in the Eighteenth-Century Novel, the latter developed during her NIAS Fellowship.
