Biography
Benjamin VanWagoner lives in New York and has been teaching Literature Humanities at Columbia University since 2020. He is the author of Imperial Ventures: Maritime Drama and the Invention of Risk (Penn Press, 2025). His writing on on enslavement, piracy, oceans, and colonialism has appeared in several major journals and edited collections. With Jane Hwang Degenhardt, he was co-editor of “Local Oceans,” a special issue of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies.
He has taught Shakespeare, postcolonial and world literature, Romanticism, theory and criticism, oceanic studies, and composition at Columbia as well as at Baruch College, CUNY; Taconic Correctional Facility (NY), and Orange High School (NJ), where he launched Bard College's Sequence Program. From 2009–11, he taught high school math in St. Louis. His teaching and research for Imperial Ventures was funded in part by a Mellon Fellowship at the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics and by a Folger Library Research Grant.
Two new books 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. "Imaginative Hydrography" has been awarded long-term fellowships at the Newberry and the John Carter Brown Libraries. The other project, “Bad Shakespeare,” is a public-facing project that playfully deconstructs presumptions of William Shakespeare’s “greatness” in the canon, scholarship, and popular culture.
