Adriana Craciun

Adriana Craciun specializes in the relationship between literature and the sciences, Arctic and environmental humanities, the history of exploration and collecting, critical plant studies, and history of British literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is completing two books: Arctic Enlightenment: The Time of Plants in the Global Seed Vault, a study of botanical vitality, temporality, and collecting from the Enlightenment to the present, is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press. She is writing a second book with Michael Bravo, Through the Living Arctic, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

Her most recent book, Writing Arctic Disaster: Authorship and Exploration (Cambridge UP, 2016), was shortlisted for the 2016 Kendrick Book Prize by the Society for Literature, Science & the Arts, and uncovers a rich textual and material archive of Arctic exploration culture from the 17th century through to our own era of renewed interest in exploration’s contentious legacies. She is also the author of Fatal Women of Romanticism (Cambridge UP, 2003) and British Women Writers and the French Revolution: Citizens of the World (Palgrave, 2005), which focused on women writers’ significant contributions to Romantic-era thinking on the body, gender, revolutionary politics, and cosmopolitanism. She is the editor of several essay collections, most recently the volumes Curious Encounters: Voyaging, Collecting and Making Knowledge in the Long 18^th Century (2019) co-edited with Mary Terrall, and  The Material Cultures of Enlightenment Arts and Sciences, co-edited with Simon Schaffer (2016), and the special issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies on The Disorder of Things (2011).

She has published numerous essays in journals such as PMLA, New Literary History, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Nineteenth-Century Literature, European Romantic Review, Atlantic Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, and Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. Before coming to BU, Craciun taught at the University of California-Riverside, the University of London, and the University of Nottingham, and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), the Fulbright Program, and the National Maritime Museum (UK). She is the editor of Studies in Romanticism, the flagship journal of Romantic literary studies founded at BU in 1961.

She is co-convenor of the interdisciplinary Arctic Environmental Humanities Workshop, and a partner in the University of the Arctic’s Critical Arctic Studies Network.  Craciun also serves on the Executive Board of the Center for the Study of Europe, as Associated Faculty at the Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, and as Affiliated Faculty in the American & New England Studies Program.