Dr Lena Wånggren works as Teaching Fellow (Centre for Open Learning) and Tutor (Department of English Literature) at the University of Edinburgh, teaching courses on English and Scottish Literature, gender studies, and feminist writing. Her work is interdisciplinary, concerning gender, intersectionality and social justice in both nineteenth-century literature and the contemporary workplace.

Holding an MSc and a PhD in English Literature from the University of Edinburgh, and a BA (Hons) in Literary Studies from Stockholm University, she works within both literary and sociological studies. In the field of English Literature she has held research and teaching positions at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (2014), Edinburgh Napier University (2016-2017), University of Glasgow (2017-2023), and University of Edinburgh (2009-). Crossing disciplines, Lena recently worked as Research Associate on disability inclusion in the workplace, and as Assistant Professor teaching equalities and workplace sociology at Heriot-Watt University (2019-2023).

Lena's research concerns questions of gender, intersectionality and social justice in nineteenth-century literature and culture, alongside interdisciplinary work on equalities in the contemporary workplace.

She publishes across disciplines stretching from literary and gender studies to medical humanities and labour studies. In nineteenth-century studies she works specifically on gender, intersectionality and science/technology (see Gender, Technology and the New Woman (2017)). She co-edited (with Karin Sellberg and Kam Aghtan) the book Corporeality and Culture: Bodies in Movement (2015) on the relation between literature, culture and embodiment. She has furthermore published articles and book chapters on literature and medicine, gender studies, pedagogy, Scottish literature, feminist writing and history, and workplace equalities.  She maintains an interest in material culture and book history, having been Research Fellow on a number of book history projects: the New Edinburgh Edition of the Works of R L Stevenson (2011-2017), the Joyce and Ernest Mehew Collection (2016-2017), The Stirling/South Carolina (S/SC) Edition of James Hogg (2018), and on a nineteenth century periodicals project (2020).

She has co-edited a number of journal special issues, including (with Maja Milatovic) one on education, intersectionality and social justice, for the Journal of Feminist Scholarship (2015), and one on international education and educational rights, for the International Education Journal: Comparative Perspectives (2018). Previously, Lena co-edited a special issue of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies entitled 'Writing Bodies: Gender and Medicine in the Nineteenth Century' (July 2013), and a special issue of Somatechnics on technology and embodiment (Mar 2014).

Lena's most recent work is the forthcoming book (with Krista Bonello) Working Conditions in a Marketised University System: Generation Precarity (2023), an intersectional study combining critical analysis and qualitative data on casualisation in UK universities. She also has two forthcoming articles on late nineteenth-century women's writing and politics.