Benjamin VanWagoner (GSAS '18) Wins RSA First Book Prize, 2026

The Department warmly congratulates Benjamin VanWagoner (GSAS '18), whose book Imperial Ventures: Maritime Drama and the Invention of Risk (Penn, 2025) has been awarded the Renaissance Society of America's inaugural First Book Prize. 

The RSA's citation for Imperial Ventures notes:

This ambitious first book connects theatre studies with the economic and social history of the early modern period through an exploration of two developments: the rise of a concept of economic risk in English commerce and the increasingly frequent presentation of “maritime peril” in dramas at the end of the sixteenth century. VanWagoner asserts that theatrical presentations of storms, shipwrecks, and capture by pirates had a larger purpose within English culture, as they drew connections with the “economic vulnerability” and “logic of uncertainty” that came with the expansion of the English overseas empire. Via his study of English drama, as well as travel narratives, news and mercantilist pamphlets, risk emerges as a complex cultural category, encompassing economic and environmental unpredictability, as well as a technical and aesthetic sensibility.