Adriana Craciun

Faculty Associate
Emma MacLachlan Metcalf Chair of Humanities; Professor, Department of English, Boston University
acraciun@bu.edu

Education

BA, University of Puget Sound; MA, PhD, University of California Davis

Expertise

Arctic humanities, history and geography of science, history of collecting and museums, exploration history and heritage, oceanic and maritime studies

Biography

Adriana Craciun is Emma MacLachlan Metcalf Chair of Humanities at Boston University. Her three most recent books are: Writing Arctic Disaster: Authorship and Exploration (Cambridge UP, 2016), which was shortlisted for the 2016 Kendrick Book Prize by the Society for Literature, Science & the Arts; The Material Cultures of Enlightenment Arts and Sciences, co‑edited with Simon Schaffer (Palgrave, 2016); and Curious Encounters: Voyaging, Collecting, and Making Knowledge in the Long 18^th Century, co-edited with Mary Terrall (Toronto UP, 2018). She is the author of several other books and dozens of peer-reviewed essays in journals such as PMLA, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Atlantic Studies, Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Craciun has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), the Fulbright Program, the National Maritime Museum (UK), and UCLA’s Center for 17th and 18th Century Studies. She has taught at the University of London, the University of Nottingham, and UC Riverside, and held visiting appointments at Edinburgh University, UCLA, and the University of Limerick.

She is currently completing a book, Arctic Enlightenments: Deep Time Floras and the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, on the history of botanical collecting, Arctic spaces, and extreme temporality, from the Enlightenment to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Craciun runs the Cultures of Science seminar series at BU and is on the Executive Board of BU’s Center for the Study of Europe.