Curriculum Vitae

Allison Wigen is an incoming Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinarity at Truman State University. A sociologist by training, her interdisciplinary research interests include culture, work, environment, inequality, and social theory. Her dissertation and book project, Art at Work: Labor and Cultural Production in the Wake of Change, explores the relationship between labor and cultural production during times of social and environmental upheaval. Utilizing ethnographic, historical, and narrative methods, she examines how commercial fishermen’s work and artmaking have evolved amid the backdrop of environmental shifts spanning from the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution to contemporary climate change.

Recent collaborative projects include exploring the duality of occupations and artistic hobbies (with coauthor Neha Gondal) and investigating how cross-class siblings experience and navigate economic difference (with coauthor Nazli Kibria).

In addition to her research, Wigen has taught in a range of undergraduate sociology courses at Boston University, including Principles in Sociology, Sociology of Popular Culture, and Sociology of Gender. She has also collaborated on course design and instruction for graduate-level courses in education, such as Slow Looking: Learning through Observation in Museums and Beyond, Text Study: Purposes, Principles, and Processes, Arts-Based Research, International Perspectives on the Arts and Education, and The Arts in Education: Philosophical Dimensions and Practical Considerations. At Truman, she will teach in the Social Sciences and Human Inquiry department supporting programs in sociology and anthropology, history, and philosophy, as well as interdisciplinary minors including environmental studies, disability studies, and museum studies.

Wigen’s academic work has appeared in Poetics, American Journal of Cultural Sociology, and Sociological Forum, and her cultural criticism has been published in Bright Lights Film Journal. She has received support for her work from the Boston University Morris Fund, a Graduate Research in the U.S. Fellowship from Boston University, and a Mystic Seaport Museum Fellowship for American Maritime Studies. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Boston University, an Ed.M. in Arts in Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and a B.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University.