Benjamin VanWagoner
Research Interests
Canons and World Literature, Early Modern British Literature and Drama, Economic History, Empire Studies, Global Anglophone Literature, Hydrography, Oceanic Studies, Postcolonial Studies
Biography
B.A. Economics, English, University of Michigan (2009); Ph.D. English, Columbia University (2018). Benjamin VanWagoner writes about early modern English literature and drama, oceanic and economic history, and postcolonial and world literatures. He is the author of Imperial Ventures: Maritime Drama and the Invention of Risk (2025), which won the Renaissance Society of America’s First Book Prize and an Honorable Mention from the Shakespeare Association of America. His work on enslavement, piracy, colonialism, scale, and precarity has appeared or is forthcoming in PMLA, Shakespeare Quarterly, Studies in English Literature, and several edited collections. With Jane Hwang Degenhardt, he was co-editor of “Local Oceans,” a special issue of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, where he now serves on the Advisory Board. He has taught Shakespeare, Romanticism, theory, criticism, composition, and canonical surveys from Homer to Toni Morrison at Columbia University; Baruch College, CUNY; Taconic Correctional Facility (NY) and Orange High School (NJ). From 2009–11, he taught algebra in St. Louis. Two book projects are underway. One, “Imaginative Hydrography,” is a postcolonial examination of the creation of not-quite-real places through late 17th-century literary technologies of oceanic reckoning. The other, “Bad Shakespeare,” is a public-facing project that playfully deconstructs presumptions of William Shakespeare’s “greatness” in the canon, scholarship, and popular culture.
