PROFILE

BENJAMIN VANWAGONER
bdv2115@columbia.edu


Benjamin VanWagoner lives in New York and teaches at Columbia University. 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 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,” is a public-facing project that playfully deconstructs presumptions of William Shakespeare’s “greatness” in the canon, scholarship, and popular culture.




CV

Education
Ph.D. English & Comp. Lit.
Columbia University (2018)

M.A. English & Comp. Lit.
Columbia University (2012)

B.A. Economics, English
University of Michigan (2009)

Books,
Articles,
& EssayImperial Ventures: Maritime Drama and the Invention of Risk 
(Penn Press, 2025)



“Shakespeare, Pixelated: Three Experiments with Scale” in Early Modern Scale, ed. Caro Pirri and Jennifer Waldron (under review at EUP for 2026)

“Jurisdiction: Oceanic Erasure and Indigenous Subjection in Dryden’s Amboyna” Water & Cognition in Early Modern English Literature ed. Steve Mentz and Nic Helms (AUP, 2024), 257–282

“Local Oceans: New Perspectives on Colonial Geographies,” a special issue of the Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies 22, no. 2 (Spring 2022):1–151
co-edited with Jane Hwang Degenhardt

“Perilous Networks: Maritime News in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly 71, no. 1 (Spring 2020): 1–28

“Capillary Obligations: Fletcher’s Island Princess and the Global Debts of the East India Company,” in Early Modern Debts, 1550–1700 ed. Laura Kolb and George Oppitz-Trotman (Palgrave, 2020), 209–31

“Pirate Economics in Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turk,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 59, no. 2 (Spring 2019): 305–24

Public
Work
“What is a ‘Student’ Politics?” Public Books (2024)

“Literature Humanities: A Guide for New Teachers” co-edited with Will Glovinsky, Center for the Core Curriculum, Columbia University (2023)

“Taconic Correctional Facility Teaching Handbook,” Mellon Foundation, Justice-in-Education Initiative, Columbia University (2018)

Early Modern Futures: an online exhibition and digital collection, maintained by the Columbia Rare Book and Manuscript Library (2015)

Honors &
Awards John Carter Brown Long-Term Research Fellowship (2025)

Newberry Library Long-Term Research Fellowship (2025; NEH grant defunded)

Folger Institute Research Fellowship (2023)

Finalist, Graduate Student Core Preceptor Award (2018)

GSAS Teaching Scholars Competition, Course: “Oceanic Shakespeare”(2017)

Mellon Interdisciplinary Fellowship, INCITE (2016–2018)

Fellow, Office of Academic Diversity, Columbia University (2015–6)

MLA Connected Academics Fellowship (public humanities, 2015–6)

Archival Research Grant for India Office Records, British Library (2015)

Folger Institute Grant for “Researching the Archive” (2014)

The Rachel-Wetzsteon Prize (for M.A. thesis, 2012) 

Marjorie Hope Nicolson Fellowship in the Humanities (2011–2)

Recent Talks “Bad Shakespeare,” The Columbia Shakespeare Seminar
(2026)

“Contingency: The State of Our Field,” Shakespeare Futures Panel, SAA Denver (2026)

“Imperial Failure and the Aesthetics of English Theater,” Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting, Boston (2025)

“Why is Shakespeare in the Park?” Shakespeare Association of America, Boston (2025)

“Local Oceans / Anti-Colonial Geographies,” Renaissance Society of America, Puerto Rico (2023)

“The ‘Berth’ of Britain, an Empire in Three Voyages,” Fordham University, London
Program; National Maritime Museum (2023)

“Jurisdiction: Erasure and Subjection in Dryden’s Amboyna,” Shakespeare Association of America (online, 2021)

“Capillary Imagination: Oceanic Debt in Fletcher’s The Island Princess,” Shakespeare
Society of America (circulated online, 2020)

“Pirate Encounters: Negotiating Risk in Shakespeare and Early East India Company Accounts,” University of Hong Kong, School of English Seminar Series, Hong Kong (2019)


TeachingLiterature Humanities I & II
Columbia University
2020–2026

Postcolonial Shakespeares
Baruch College, CUNY
2022

Counter-cultural Romanticism
Baruch College, CUNY
2020

World Literature & Form
Bard Early Colleges
2019–2020

Great Works of Literature I & II
Baruch College, CUNY
2018–2019

Global Shakespeare (/w Jean Howard)
Taconic Correctional Facility
2018

Literature Humanities I & II
Columbia University
2017–2018

Literary Texts & Critical Methods
Columbia University
2015

Renaissance Taboo: Sex Tragedies, Witches, and Betrayal Plots
Barnard College
2014–2015

University Writing
Columbia University
2013–2015

Algebra & Advanced Algebra
Soldan High School, St. Louis
2009–2011
Professional
AffiliationsShakespeare Association of America

Renaissance Society of America

American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

Modern Language Association

Justice-in-Education Initiative          






Last Updated 24.10.31