Whose North? Literary Technologies of Arctic Possession

Over the course of the seventeenth century, the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans would occupy a spectral position in English literature and drama even as great numbers of workaday fisherman began to sail between England, Iceland, and Newfoundland in pursuit of cod. This talk brings together these extremes, to investigate not only the practices of map-making and Arctic navigation, but also the oceanic political fictions that emerged around them throughout the seventeenth century. 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) which won the Renaissance Society of America’s First Book Prize. His writing on enslavement, piracy, oceans, colonialism, and precarity has appeared in edited volumes and journals including PMLA and Shakespeare Quarterly. With Jane Hwang Degenhardt, he was co-editor of “Local Oceans,” a special issue of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, where he now serves on the Advisory Board. 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). Sponsored by the Medieval & Renaissance Studies Program, the Early Modern Worlds Initiative, the Department of English, and Undergraduate Studies