As a researcher, I consider myself a hybrid creature: I’m an interdisciplinarian who studies the intersections between literature, visual culture, science, and history. I am always guided by the question: How does the evolving way we represent animals tell us more about what it means to be human?
Areas of Specialization
Nineteenth-Century British and Anglophone Literature and Culture; Teacher Education; Critical Animal Studies; Ecocriticism; Science and Literature; Media and Visual Culture; Gender Studies; Rhetoric and Composition; Career Education in the Humanities
Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications
Journal Articles in Peer-Reviewed Publications
“Adapting the Victorians: An Introduction.” South Atlantic Review/Adapting the Victorians Special Issue, Winter 2023. In addition to writing this chapter, I edited this peer-reviewed special issue.
“‘What is it?’ ‘It is a lewd goblin’: Taking Critical Cues from Illustrative Adaptations of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market.” Adaptation. Winter 2023.
“‘Are We Not Men?’ Science, Sympathy, and Women in Adaptations of H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau.” Literature/Film Quarterly, Summer 2019.
Chapters in Peer-Reviewed Books
Upcoming, with Lissette Lopez-Szwydky: “Blueprinting a Storyworld from Poe’s Shorts: The Fall of the House of Usher on Netflix” in To Make a Short Story Long: Theories of Adapting Short Fiction. Ed. Glenn Jellenik, Palgrave, forthcoming 2026.
“Alice, Animals, and Adaptation: How Alice’s Early Adaptation History Nurtured John Tenniel’s Influence on Wonderland.” in Adaptation Before Cinema, Ed. Glenn Jellenik and Lissette Lopez Szwydky, Palgrave, 2023.
“Testimonies of the Permian Basin,” in Oil Fictions: World Literature and our Contemporary Petrosphere, AnthropoScene Series, Ed. Stacey Balkan and Swaralipi Nandi, Pennsylvania State University Press, October 2021.
“Crude: The Unrefined Communities and Landscapes of Petrofiction.” in Boom or Bust: Narrative, Life, and Culture in the West Texas Oil Patch, University of Oklahoma Press, Spring 2021. Wrote above chapter and co-wrote introduction. Co-edited book, which contains both creative nonfiction and peer-reviewed scholarly chapters about the petroleum industry in West Texas.
“‘The Integrity of Nature’: A Comparative Analysis of Environmental Anxieties in the Fictions of H.P. Lovecraft and Jeff VanderMeer,” in Fiction and the Sixth Mass Extinction: Narrative in an Era of Loss, Ed. Jonathan Elmore, Rowman & Littlefield, April 2020.
“Flash and Fabulism: A New Marriage of Old Forms,” Critical Insights: Flash Fiction, Salem Press, 2016
Peer-Reviewed Edited Collections/Special Issues
South Atlantic Review/Adapting the Victorians Special Issue, Winter 2023.
Boom or Bust: A Collection and Investigation of Energy Narratives. Ed. Sheena Stief, Kristen Figgins, and Rebecca Babcock, University of Oklahoma Press, 2021
Book Reviews
Review for for Victorian Periodical Review: Transfictional Character and Transmedia Storyworlds in the British Nineteenth-Century (2022, Palgrave Fan Studies Series) by Laura Haugtvedt
Academic Conferences & Invited Talks
“Based on a True Prompt: Adaptation, AI, and the Academic Imagination,” Arkansas Philological Association Conference, Fayetteville, AR, upcoming November 2025.
“The Adapted Edgar Allan Poe: Knowing and Unknowing Biographical Adaptation,” South Atlantic Modern Language Association Conference, Atlanta, GA, upcoming November 2025.
“The Haunted Women of Edgar Allan Poe and Roderick Usher,” Literature/Film Association Conference, Savannah, GA, September 2025.
“Adaptation Today: Slightly Aged,” with Kathryn McClain, Julie Grossman, Gracie Bain, Rebecca Raddatz, Cat Champney, and James Fleury, LFA/AAS Joint Conference, February 2025.
“To Talk of Many Things: Natural Science in the Fiction of the Victorian Empire,” Provost’s Faculty Research Symposium, November 2024.
“Adaptation at the Edges: The Pedagogical Merits of Near Adaptations in Canonical Conversation,” British Association of Film, Television, and Screen Studies, Adaptation SIG, September 2024.
“‘Eat me, drink me, love me’: Desire and Reproduction of the Animal Body in Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” and Adaptations,” British Women Writers Conference, Boulder, Colorado, May 2024.
“‘Go ask Alice. I think she’ll know’: Creating Meaning Together with Anti-Racist and Anti-Ableist Formative Assessment,” LFA/AAS Joint Conference, February 2024.
“Evolving and Interdisciplinary: Embracing an Undisciplined Adaptation Studies in Academia,” South Atlantic Modern Language Association, Atlanta, GA, November 2023.
“Adapting Darwin in the Anthropocene,” Literature/Film Association Conference: Ecologies of/and Adaptation,” University of Montana, September 2023.
“Evolutionary Theory in Literature and Culture,” Invited guest speaker for interdisciplinary Honors Darwin Seminar, University of Arkansas, March 2023.
“Jurassic World(s): Illustration, Toys, and Documentary as Adaptive Paleontology,” South Atlantic Modern Language Association, November 2022, chair.
“Towards a Theory of Evolutionary Adaptation,” Pandemic Adaptation Panel, Northeast Modern Language Association, March 2022.
“Speaking the Animal’s Voice: Language in Transnational and Transmedia Adaptations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Modern Language Association, January 2022.
“Closing the Gaps: The Intimacy of Adaptation,” Roundtable: Tough Nuts for Adaptation to Crack, Association of Adaptation Studies, South Atlantic Modern Language Association, November 2021.
“‘Our Ways Are Not Your Ways’: Contracting Time and Space in Adaptations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897),” South Atlantic Modern Language Association, November 2021, chair.
“Darwin’s Influence on Literature and Culture,” Invited guest speaker for interdisciplinary Honors Darwin Seminar, University of Arkansas, March 6-9, 2021.
“You Should Not Peep at Goblin Men”: Tracking the Animal Body in Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’ and Adaptations.” South Atlantic Modern Language Association, November 2020.
“Taming the Jungle: Adaptation and Appropriation.” Literature/Film Association, November 2020.
‘“‘Dead Since 1865’: Ways of Knowing in Faulkner’s Post-Apocalyptic South,” Society for the Study of Southern Literature, Fayetteville, Arkansas, April 2020. [Cancelled due to COVID-19]
“‘To Talk of Many Things’: Lewis Carroll and His Animals,” Graduate Students in English Interdisciplinary Conference, Fayetteville, Arkansas, March 2020. [Cancelled due to COVID-19]
“‘They’d Eaten Every One’: Predation, Consumption, and Consent in Lewis Carroll’s ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ and Adaptations.” South Atlantic Modern Language Association, Atlanta, Georgia, November 2019.
“Dumbing Down Nature: How the Mythology of an Unintelligent Nature Supports Systems of Power and Abuse in Jeff VanderMeer’s Area X,” Graduate Students in English Interdisciplinary Conference, Fayetteville, Arkansas, March 2018.
“Bats, Beasts, and Bullets: The Fable as Comic Book” Midwest PCA/ACA Conference, St. Louis, Missouri, October 2017, Chair
“Fire Bad, Tree Pretty: Psychoanalysis at Work in Buffy,” accepted for presentation at the Pop Culture Association Annual Conference, Boston, Massachusetts, Spring 2012, Chair
“The Frenchman at the Kitchen Table: The Influence of Jean Baudrillard, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida on a Modern American Literary Family,” presented at the Language, Literature, and Culture Conference, Lafayette, Louisiana, March 2012
“Lost In the Gaze: Paralyzing Female Power in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene,”presented at the South Central Renaissance Conference, New Orleans, Louisiana, March 2012
“The Vampire Divided: An Examination of the Vampire’s Progress from Dracula to Cullen,” presented at The Best of Three: The 36th Annual Children’s Literature Association Conference, Charlotte, North Carolina, June 2009.
Career Diversity and Pedagogy-Centered Presentations
“Navigating Graduate School and Academia with Career Diversity in Mind.” Arkansas Humanities Center, 27 April 2022.
“Grading Contracts are Great.” Introductory video for University of Arkansas’s pilot contract grading system, which adapts my grading contract for use across all sections of first-year composition, May 2021.
“Grading Contracts: Why They’re Worth It.” Teaching Workshop for Rhetoric and Composition Office, 10 March 2020.
“Primary and Secondary Schooled: Tools for Teaching Types of Sources.” Teaching Workshop for Rhetoric and Composition Office, 19 September 2018.
“Teaching Rhetorical Appeal Using the Zombie Apocalypse.” Teaching Workshop for Rhetoric and Composition Office, 18 April 2018.
“The Effect of Mindfulness on Phobias and Blocks in the Writing Center,” South Central Writing Center Association Conference, Conway, Arkansas, February 2018.
“Career Options for English Majors,” Early College High School Guest Presentation, UT Permian Basin, April 2017.
“Tutoring Connections Between Critical and Creative Writing,” presented at the South Central Writing Center Association Annual Conference, Houston, Texas, February 2010.
Kristen Figgins, Ph.D. 