BENJAMIN VANWAGONER
bdv2115@columbia.edu
Benjamin VanWagoner lives in New York and teaches at Columbia University. He the author of Imperial Ventures: Maritime Drama and the Invention of Risk (Penn Press, 2025). He has also published on piracy, news, seascapes, and colonial subjection in several 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 University; Baruch College, CUNY; Taconic Correctional Facility (NY) and Orange High School (NJ). From 2009–11, he taught high school math 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,” a public-facing project that playfully deconstructs presumptions of William Shakespeare’s “greatness” in the canon, scholarship, and popular culture.
He has taught Shakespeare, postcolonial and world literature, Romanticism, theory and criticism, oceanic studies, and composition at Columbia University; Baruch College, CUNY; Taconic Correctional Facility (NY) and Orange High School (NJ). From 2009–11, he taught high school math 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,” a public-facing project that playfully deconstructs presumptions of William Shakespeare’s “greatness” in the canon, scholarship, and popular culture.
WORK
CV