Adriana Craciun

Adriana Craciun's research and teaching focus on Arctic humanities, environmental humanities, history of science and culture, critical plant studies, and exploration studies.
She is a Professor at Boston University and Institute Associate at Cambridge's Scott Polar Research Institute.
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.

Her new book, Arctic Enlightenment: The Time of Plants in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, is forthcoming from Minnesota University Press in their Environmental Humanities series. She is also co-authoring Through the Living Arctic with Michael Bravo, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. With Bravo she runs the Arctic Environmental Humanities Series, a collaboration of Boston University's Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future and the Scott Polar Research Institute (Cambridge), where Craciun is an Institute Associate.

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). She is the editor of several essay collections, most recently the volumes Curious Encounters: Voyaging, Collecting and Making Knowledge in the Long 18th Century (2019), 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 Environmental Humanities, 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).