Benjamin D. VanWagoner is a doctoral candidate in the English department, where he focuses on early modern English drama, maritime culture, and the history of economics. His dissertation project argues that theatrical maritime spectacles introduce risk as a discrete economic concept alongside the English expansion into global trade, and reads accounts from the East India Company alongside a wide corpus of early modern maritime drama. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from the University of Michigan, and worked for two years in urban St. Louis as a high school math teacher.
