What Works, What Doesn't, and How to Have a Career Anyway

A workshop for graduate students and jobseekers in the humanities. 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). From 2009–11, he taught high school math in St. Louis. Pizza and beverages provided. Co-sponsored by the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program, the Early Worlds Initiative, the Department of English, and the Department of French and Italian