SELECTED PROJECTS
Image: Stockholm, Sweden, the Östersjön
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1. Imperial Ventures: Maritime Drama and the Invention of Risk
University of Pennsylvania Press (2025)
Imperial Ventures links drama and empire studies to demonstrate that performances of maritime peril on the London stage normalized a new sense of economic uncertainty--the concept we now call risk. Research for the project was funded by a Mellon Interdisciplinary Fellowship as well as grants for archival work at the India Office Records, Caird Library, and The National Archives (UK).
“This excellent and erudite book reconsiders early modern maritime drama in terms of imperialism and colonial expansion, brilliantly bringing together new developments in critical thinking about race, slavery, economic risk, and related areas. Anyone interested in oceanic cultures, early modern globalization, ecological imperialism, or the blue humanities should read this book!"
Steve Mentz (St. Johns Univeristy)
"Imperial Ventures is a path-breaking study of early modern postcolonialism, examining how risk animated both economic discourses and dramatic representations of peril at sea. The strength of this book lies in its fresh readings of familiar plays as they dramatize the risks and challenges of the new maritime economy buttressing England’s imperialist drives.”
Jyotsna G. Singh (Michigan State University)
"In the midst of twenty-first-century refugee crises, climate migrations, and supply-chain volatility, Benjamin VanWagoner’s study of the early modern history of maritime risk and theatrical performance is both timely and keenly illuminating. Offering incisive case studies of a corpus of maritime plays and venturing documents, this provocative book demonstrates the theater’s contributions to a ‘cultural archaeology’ of risk punctuated by shipwreck, pirates, enslavement, and subjection."
Jane Hwang Degenhardt (UMass Amherst)
Image: National Archaelogical Museum, Athens
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2. Teaching: Literature Humanities I & II
Columbia University
2020–2026
The foundational course of the Columbia College Core Curriculum for nearly one-hundred years. In seminars of 22 students, we trace the arcs of literate culture around the Mediterranean through its development in the Ancient Near East, through 5th-century Athens and Augustan Rome, to Florence and the European Renaissance, and into the colonial contexts of Brazil, Martinique, and America. An interdisciplinary course, ranging and critical, that celebrates the power of discussion and collective action.
Enheduanna, Gilgamesh, Genesis, The Iliad and Odyssey, Sappho, Aeschylus, Plato, Song of Songs, Apuleius, The Gospel of John, Augustine, The Qur’an, Ibn Arabi, Dante, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Sor Juana, Machado de Assis, Césaire, Morrison, and often more.
I’ve taught nearly 1000 hours of Lit Hum, and write recommendations for 40+ students within a close-knit, supportive intellectual community that spans cohorts.
Image:Aberdeen Harbor, Hong Kong
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3. “Imaginative Hydrography: Oceanic Fictions of the Early Modern Global Anglophone” (Monograph-in-Progress)
By the mid-seventeenth century, English writers, merchants, and statesmen were constructing oceanic fictions across the globe. They used sensational names like “the Northwest Passage” or “Novaya Zemlya,” “Patagonia” or “the Spice Islands”; these were places suspended--not quite real--between their technical and literary representations.
“Imaginative Hydrography” subverts the English sensationalism of distant places imagined as foreign, exotic, or incomprehensible, re-orienting Edward Said’s postcolonial sense of “imaginative geography” toward the early modern sea to examine how English literature and drama—alongside nautical charts, navigational manuals, and colonial accounts—“created” maritime locales in order to make them available for exploration and exploitation.
Early parts of this work have been published in the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies (”Local Oceans”) and as an essay on Dryden’s Amboyna and the Malay Archipelago (Watery Cognition). The project has been awarded Long Term Fellowships for research from the Newberry and John Carter Brown Libraries.
Image: Car Boot Sale, Princess May School, London
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4. “Bad Shakespeare” (Monograph-in-Progress)
A public-facing book that examines the cultural and political efficacy of Anglophone literature by questioning some of its essential premises. Each of its short essays takes up a context in which presumptions of William Shakespeare’s uniform “greatness” have had perplexing, even damaging impact.
This project explores the Shakespeare of Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, Henry VIII, and Pericles; it reads not Henry IV, but Henry VI. It queries Shakespeare’s unshakeable position in “great books” programs, his regular co-authorship, the popularity of Shakespeare in prison education and performance, the American phenomenon of “Shakespeare in the park,” and the startling humanity of Shakespearean character.
The project’s direction is fueled equally by the affordances of new formalism and urgent concerns about the role of the Anglophone canon in the resurgence of far right, white supremacist movements in the United States and Britain. In this way, while “Bad Shakespeare” is skeptical of literary attachment, it is also a fundamentally optimistic book about our discipline’s central figure.
All images © Benjamin VanWagoner