Dr Lena Wånggren works as Teaching Fellow (Centre for Open Learning) and Tutor (Department of English Literature) in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, teaching courses on English and Scottish Literature, gender studies, and feminist writing. She is also a Research Fellow in the School of Geosciences, where she co-runs (with Cecile Menard) the UKRI/BA-funded project In Their Own Time which examines marginalised casualised academics’ unpaid and invisibilised labour.

Her work is interdisciplinary, concerning gender, intersectionality and social justice in both nineteenth-century literature and the contemporary workplace. She has taught in UK universities for 15 years, with specific expertise in feminist, decolonial and antiracist pedagogies, and literature and science/technology/medicine.

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). She is currently Director of EDI at the Centre for Open Learning.

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.

Her recent publications include articles on literary feminist utopias (Women's Writing, 2024) and nineteenth-century trade union fictions (VLC, 2024). Her current research project (funded by a Willison Trust Award) examines literary writings in nineteenth-century women's trade union periodicals. She has worked previously on gender, intersectionality and science/technology (see e.g. Gender, Technology and the New Woman (2017)), and has published on literature and medicine, gender studies, pedagogy, Scottish literature, feminist writing and history. 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 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).

As part of her work on equalities in the workplace, she recently obtained a UKRI grant (with Cecile Menard) for the project In Their Own Time: challenging conventional funding structures to include intersectionally underrepresented casualised academics, undertaken in the School of Geosciences. This project follows the co-authored (with Krista Bonello) monograph Working Conditions in a Marketised University System: Generation Precarity (2023), an intersectional study on casualisation and inequalities in UK universities.