Current and Upcoming Folger Institute Scholarly Programs

Schedule as of May 15, 2024

The Folger Shakespeare Library will reopen Friday, June 21, 2024, after major renovations. Newly refurbished spaces for our Folger researchers are among the improvements, which also include dedicated exhibition galleries, meeting spaces with enhanced audio-visual capabilities, and updated HVAC systems.

The Folger Institute relies on our Consortium university partners to plan, implement, and oversee our Scholarly Programs. In addition to programs held at the newly reopened Folger, we anticipate continuing our recent practice of partnering with Consortium universities to convene scholarly conversations on their campuses. These will take advantage of unique, localized knowledge, underexplored archives, and diverse communities of inquiry and practice. A process to submit proposals is available on Folgerpedia.

Below are the descriptions for the programs on offer during 2024-2025. We have embraced a mix of in-person, hybrid, and fully virtual programming across a wide range of topics, with an eye on reducing or eliminating barriers to inclusion as often as possible. Some programs will offer virtual sessions, with participation available via open registration. Most will require applications from those hoping to participate fully, and the application deadlines are specified below. This ensures that those selected and funded to attend will be strong contributors to the conversation.

As always, participants are encouraged to pursue their individual research interests within a given program’s specific topic. Before submitting an application, applicants should read the description carefully so that they can tailor their statement of research plans to the program in question. Folger Institute Consortium affiliates should consult with their campus representatives to ensure that they make their strongest case for admission. Please visit Apply for Scholarly Programs for further details about the application process.

Additional programs will be added as the year progresses, and these programs, as well as any revisions and adjustments to previously announced ones, will be reflected on this page and promoted through our various channels, including the Folger’s bi-monthly newsletter, the Research Bulletin. Those not yet subscribed may do so here.

If you have any questions about these programs, or the logistics of applying, email us at institute@folger.edu.

Yearlong 2024-2025

Directed by Amanda Bailey (University of Maryland) and Ruben Espinosa (Arizona State University)

Public Humanities is an emerging academic discipline concerned with how humanities scholarship can engage broader publics. Through rigorous theoretical and historical readings, this colloquium will explore ideas of the public, consider the state of the humanities, and learn about interventions made by early modern scholars. Rather than seeing literary history in opposition to public engagement, participants will consider the ways academic training can be leveraged to reach diverse audiences, exploit new media platforms, and generate innovative venues for scholarly research. Looking forward and backward in sessions alternating between in person and virtual, the colloquium will use the Folger’s archives to research an array of knowledge-making modes and knowledge communities as participants investigate conditions and spaces where humanistic knowledge has been produced and transmitted in the past. The colloquium will also consider cutting-edge technologies, approaches, and theories that allow scholars to make their own research legible and compelling. In exploring the breadth, depth, and value of the humanities to public life, we will also consider the limits of current models of applied humanities. Advanced graduate students preparing for an academic career as undergraduate education shifts to project-based, collaborative, public-facing learning are invited to apply, as are faculty, at all stages, who are interested in shifts in our profession and discipline. The colloquium will invite guest practitioners and learn about their current projects, including obstacles and best practices. 

Co-directors: Amanda Bailey is ADVANCE Professor and Chair of the Department of English at the University of Maryland.  A scholar of early modern literature and culture, her teaching and research focus on the histories of marginalized peoples and systems of oppression, political and legal thought, and current state of higher education. She is the author of Flaunting: Style and the Subversive Male Body in Renaissance England; Of Bondage: Debt, Property, and Personhood in Early Modern England; and, most recently, Shakespeare on Consent (2023). Her monograph in progress, Democracy with Publics, explores the role of the humanities in the democratization of higher education. Ruben Espinosa is Professor of English at Arizona State University and Director of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. He is the author of Shakespeare on the Shades of Racism (2021), Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England (2011), and co-editor of Shakespeare and Immigration (2014). He is President of the Shakespeare Association of America (2024-2026), and is working on his next monograph, Shakespeare on the Border: Language, Legitimacy and La Frontera.  

Invited speakers will be announced soon. 

Anticipated schedule: Eight Friday mornings, 10 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Eastern, October through June, with four virtual and four in-person sessions at the Folger Shakespeare Library: October 11, November 22, December 13, 2024; January 31, February 28, April 18, May 9, and June 13, 2025. The November, January, and April sessions will be virtual. 

Apply: July 8, 2024. Folger Fellowships will support twelve colloquium participants with $5,000 honoraria each. All are welcome to apply regardless of location or Consortium affiliation. 

Directed by Holly Brewer and Alejandro Cañeque (both University of Maryland)

This colloquium considers the interconnected topics of enslavement, race, and war in the Spanish and English empires. Drawing on the primary sources produced by these and other empires (including African, native American, Portuguese, Dutch, and French), a dozen participants will consider the many points of cultural connection and overlap, violent conflict, and major events and debates, in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Central questions may include: How did imperial struggles affect local wars? How did wars for territory and trade connect to slavery? How did philosophical debates over Indigenous treatment and Christianization, like the Valladolid Debate of 1550–1551, shape later thinking about the justification of enslavement? How does the contest for the early modern Atlantic World connect to larger historical debates about human equality and/or racism that persist to today? The colloquium will be of interest to historians, scholars of comparative literature, and visual studies scholars. Scholars working on histories of empires, enslavement, and war in Africa, Europe, and the Americas will bring crucial perspectives to this monthly program. Visiting faculty will be invited to address specialized topics aligned with the research interests of the admitted participants. 

Directors: Holly Brewer is Burke Professor of American History and Associate Professor at the University of Maryland. Her first book, By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority, traced the origin and impact of “democratical” ideas across the early British empire by examining debates about who can consent in theory and legal practice. A forthcoming monograph, “The Kings’ Slaves: Creating America’s Plantation System,” was supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship. Alejandro Cañeque is Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research focuses on the political and religious cultures of colonial Latin America and the Spanish Empire. He is the author of The King’s Living Image: The Culture and Politics of Viceregal Power in Colonial Mexico and, most recently, Un imperio de mártires. Religión y poder en las fronteras de la Monarquía Hispánica.

Anticipated Schedule: Eight Friday afternoons, 2:00-4:00 p.m. Eastern, October through May, with four virtual and four in-person sessions at the Folger Shakespeare Library: October 4, November 8, December 6, 2024; January 24, February 7, March 7, April 11, and May 9, 2025. The December, February, March, and April sessions will be virtual. 

Apply: July 8, 2024, for admission and grants-in-aid for Folger Institute Consortium affiliates. 

Co-directed by  Herman Bennett (City University of New York) and Jenny Mann (New York University) 

This program focuses on the use of primary materials available for the study of the history, culture, society, and literature of early modern Britain, Europe, and the Atlantic World, broadly conceived. The goal throughout will be to foster interdisciplinary scholarship while considering broad methodological and theoretical problems relevant to current work in early modern studies, especially when working in fields that contain deliberate elisions and silences in their historical archives. Twelve to fourteen participants are welcome to explore the Folger Collections and other DC-area special collections to study a variety of printed and manuscript sources relevant to Ph.D. candidates in history and literature. They will learn (with the support and assistance of Folger librarians and curatorial staff) essential research skills as well as strategies for working with digital resources and remediated rare materials. Preference will be given to applicants who have completed course work and preliminary exams; they should be preparing a prospectus or beginning to draft chapters. Applicants should consult with their dissertation directors before applying to ensure that their work is at a stage that would benefit from the seminar, and their directors should certify that this is the case in their recommendation letters. Those whose dissertations are substantially complete will not be competitive applicants.

Directors: Herman L. Bennett is Professor at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and Director of the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean (IRADAC). Among his monographs are Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570–1640 (2003); Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico (2009); and African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty & Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic (2019). Jenny C. Mann is an Associate Professor of English at New York University with a joint appointment with NYU Gallatin. She has followed her first book, Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare’s England (2012), with The Trials of Orpheus: Poetry, Science, and the Early Modern Sublime (2021). Her current research project explores problems of self-reference in utopian literature from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century.

Anticipated Schedule: Six Thursday afternoons, 1 to 4:30 p.m. Eastern, from October through June: October 3, November 7, and December 5, 2024; February 13, April 10, and June 12, 2025. Admitted participants will receive two nights of lodging and are expected to use that Friday to conduct research at the Folger Shakespeare Library and other DC-area collections. The February and April dates will be virtual.

Apply: July 8, 2024. This program is only open to Folger Institute Consortium affiliates.

Fall 2024

Organized by Brandi K. Adams (Arizona State University), Claire M. L. Bourne (Pennsylvania State University), Rory Loughnane (University of Kent), and Catherine Richardson (University of Kent)

Textual editing is a vital field of study and practice for early modern studies, one that helps to establish who and what is being read in the classroom and wider community and performed globally. It creates canons, ascribes value, and recovers lost voices. How texts are introduced, edited, and annotated also produces modes of reading and institutes habits of analysis. Textual editing is, however, weighed down by critical tradition and even gatekeeping. This is especially the case in the editing of major early modern authors such as Marlowe or Shakespeare, where any new emendation must engage with a pedantic and often exclusionary history of decision-making. Many working in early modern studies wish to see a more positive, diverse, and inclusive future, and this timely symposium aims to bring together a wide range of practitioners in textual studies and cognate fields to discuss possibilities and identify pathways to make this a reality. Using the past, present, and future editing of the works of Marlowe and Shakespeare to center the symposium’s discussion and analysis, this event will provide a “state of the field” exchange that aims to chart expansive and inclusive futures for editorial practices.

Organizers: Brandi K. Adams is Assistant Professor of English at Arizona State University. Her work appears in journals and essay collections including Shakespeare Quarterly and The Oxford Handbook of the History of the Book in Early Modern England. She is currently editing Merry Wives of Windsor with Jonathan Hope and writing her first monograph entitled Representations of Books and Readers in Early Modern English drama (1580-1640). Claire M. L. Bourne is Associate Professor of English at The Pennsylvania State University. She is author of Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England (2020) and co-author with Jason Scott-Warren of “‘thy unvalued Booke’: John Milton’s Copy of the Shakespeare First Folio” (2022). She is editing 1 Henry the Sixth, for The Arden Shakespeare, Fourth Series, and writing a new editorial history of Shakespeare through the materials and labor of bookwork. Rory Loughnane is Reader in Early Modern Studies at the University of Kent. He is the author or editor of ten books and has published widely on Shakespeare and early modern studies. For the New Oxford Shakespeare, he has edited more than ten of Shakespeare’s plays. He is a Series Editor of Studies in Early Modern Authorship (Routledge) and Shakespeare and Text (Cambridge), and a General Editor of The Revels Plays series (Manchester) and the forthcoming edition of Oxford Marlowe. Catherine Richardson is Professor of Early Modern Studies and Director of the Institute of Cultural and Creative Industries, University of Kent. She explores early modern material culture on and off stage and the history of the creative industries, most recently in A Day at Home in Early Modern England, with Tara Hamling (Yale), Practices of Ephemera in Early Modern England, edited with Callan Davies and Hannah Lilley (Routledge) Arden of Faversham (Bloomsbury), and the forthcoming edition of Oxford Marlowe.

Invited speakers will be announced soon. 

Anticipated Schedule: Thursday evening through Saturday, October 17-19, 2024, at the Folger Shakespeare Library. 

Apply: July 8, 2024, for admission and grants-in-aid for Folger Institute Consortium affiliates.

Spring 2025

Co-directed by Alan H. Nelson, Lena Orlin, and Duncan Salkeld 

The Bridewell Court Minute Books offer windows onto the everyday lives of early modern Londoners—from the destitute to the upper middle-class—who ran afoul of the law for myriad reasons. The Minutes Books thus also form an ideal pathway into archival research, recording demographic and other information about early modern Londoners accused of prostitution, adultery, theft, begging, gambling, witchcraft, cross-dressing, and other types of disorder. Typical entries document criminal charges; note the time and place of alleged infractions; provide verbatim interrogations; and record court decisions, including dismissal, whipping, forced work, fines, incarceration, referral to “Bedlam,” or deportation to Virginia. Bethlem Royal Hospital makes the Minute Books available online, via open access, in high-resolution digital images. This two-part seminar will share modernized transcriptions of the Court Minute Books from the years 1559 through 1610 and beyond with scholars who wish to explore the administration and functions of Bridewell; put Bridewell in the context of other early modern courts and other institutions, authorities, or bodies that regulated behavior; or consider the intersections between crime, punishment, gender, race, geographical origins, and class. Those with relevant interests are encouraged to apply. 

Co-directors: Alan H. Nelson is Alan H. Nelson is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English in the University of California, Berkeley. His specializations are paleography, bibliography, and the reconstruction of the literary life and times of medieval and Renaissance England from documentary sources. He is a major contributor of essays to the Shakespeare Documented project sponsored by the Folger Shakespeare Library. Lena Cowen Orlin is Emeritus Professor of English at Georgetown University and Fellow of the Hagler Institute for Advanced Study. Her work on London includes Material London, ca. 1600 and Locating Privacy in Tudor London. Her most recent publication is the archival biography, The Private Life of William Shakespeare. Duncan Salkeld is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English in the University of Chichester, England. His specializations are Shakespeare and early modern London, textual and authorship studies and paleography. His book Shakespeare and London draws extensively on the Bridewell records.

Anticipated Schedule: All day Friday and Saturday, February 21-22, and May 23-24, 2025, at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Following January’s extensive introduction to the Court Minute Books, Bridewell’s situation in London, and other areas of interest to participants, the May meeting will be devoted to the participants sharing their Bridewell-related research projects. 

Apply: November 4, 2024. Applicants should describe the research project or interests that they hope to develop over the course of spring 2025 with the advice of the co-directors and new colleagues. While facility with English paleography is not required, please note your ability level. 

Directed by Heather Wolfe

This weeklong course provides an intensive introduction to handwriting in early modern England, with a particular emphasis on the English secretary hand of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Working from digitized and physical manuscripts, participants will be trained in the accurate reading and transcription of secretary, italic, and mixed hands. The workshop’s focus will include recipe books, personal correspondence, and poetry miscellanies drawn from the Folger collection. Participants will experiment with contemporary writing materials (quills, iron gall ink, and paper); learn the terminology for describing and comparing letterforms; and become skillful decipherers of abbreviations, numbers, and dates. Transcriptions made by participants will become part of the Early Modern Manuscripts Online (EMMO) corpus. 

Director: Heather Wolfe is Consulting Curator of Manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She was formerly Associate Librarian, co-director of the multi-year research project Before ‘Farm to Table’: Early Modern Foodways and Cultures, and principal investigator of Early Modern Manuscripts Online. Author of numerous articles on early modern manuscripts, Dr. Wolfe has edited The Literary Career and Legacy of Elizabeth Cary, 1613–1680 (2007), The Trevelyon Miscellany of 1608: A Facsimile Edition of Folger Shakespeare Library MS V.b.232 (2007), Letterwriting in Renaissance England (2004) (with Alan Stewart), and Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland: Life and Letters (2001). She is currently working on a book on early modern writing paper in England.

Anticipated Schedule: Tuesday through Saturday, June 3-7, 2025, at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Apply: March 3, 2025, for admission and grants-in-aid for Folger Institute Consortium affiliates.

Summer 2025

Directed by Patricia Akhimie, Caroline Duroselle-Melish, Heather Wolfe, and Owen Williams

The best research is based on inquiry and allows for serendipity. A scholar needs to sharpen research questions and search skills simultaneously and with sensitivity to the ways questions and sources affect each other. The available evidence may invite a new thesis, require a revised approach, or even suggest a new field of exploration. This intensive week is not designed to advance participants’ individual research projects. Rather, it aims to cultivate the participants’ curiosity about primary resources by using exercises that engage their research interests. It is offered to help early-stage graduate students develop a set of research-oriented literacies as they explore the Folger Collections in ways that will be useful for navigating other collections. With the guidance of visiting faculty and curatorial staff from the Folger, twelve to fourteen participants will examine bibliographical tools and their logics, hone their early modern book description skills, learn best practices for organizing and working with digital images, and improve their understanding of the cultural and technological histories of texts. Participants will ask reflexive questions about the nature of primary sources, the collections that house them, and the tools whereby one can access them.

Anticipated Schedule: Tuesday through Saturday, August 12-16, 2025, at the Folger Shakespeare Library. 

Apply: March 3, 2025, for admission and grants-in-aid for Folger Institute Consortium affiliates.

Yearlong 2023-2024

Directed by Bernadette Andrea

This yearlong colloquium will pursue theoretical, methodological, and critical questions about “a range of identity positions” in the context of “systems of power” — from Brittney Cooper’s definition of “intersectionality” — with attention to the emerging and established empires of early modernity. The emphasis will be on transcultural lives with transtemporal resonances, from Leo Africanus / al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wezzan to Pocahontas / Matoaka. Grounded in a series of case studies covering African, Asian, and Indigenous American migrants to early modern Europe, the ongoing discussions will support participants’ projects on translation, critical fabulation, biofiction, and related topics; comparative approaches across languages and geographies are encouraged. Invited speakers in the fall will serve as interlocutors and resources for participants, who will be able to suggest speakers in the spring to support their presentations and projects. The colloquium will conclude with an in-person symposium at the Folger Shakespeare Library, where participants will access the newly refurbished reading room, present works-in-progress, and dialogue with educators, librarians, and other thinkers.

Director: Bernadette Andrea is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies in the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is also affiliated with the Center for Middle East Studies, the Comparative Literature Program, and the Department of Feminist Studies. Her books include The Lives of Girls and Women from the Islamic World in Early Modern British Literature and Culture (University of Toronto Press, 2017) and Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2007). She currently serves as co-editor, with Julie D. Campbell and Allyson M. Poska, of Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and was the President of the Shakespeare Association of America for 2022–2023.

Anticipated Schedule: Virtual monthly meetings on Friday afternoons, 2:00–4:30 p.m. (Eastern); 11–1:30 p.m. (Pacific): September 15, October 20, November 17, and December 15, 2023; January 19, February 16, and March 15, 2024. One in-person session will be scheduled at the Folger Shakespeare Library in the late spring.

Apply: July 10, 2023, for admission and grants-in-aid to support travel and lodging for the in-person session.

Directed by Emma Smith

This yearlong seminar has the modest aim of mobilizing the next generation of Shakespeare editors to take their place in the long history of textual scholarship stretching back to the eighteenth century. Our conversations, readings, expert guests, and practical exercises will develop confident ways of understanding and critiquing existing editorial practice and choices. Contemporary editing is an art not a science: it has its technocratic aspects, but it is also interpretative and imaginative. Although editors do need to have a working sense of certain histories and shared hypotheses about textual transmission, and of course they also need familiarity with a genealogy of editorial conversations, nevertheless, too often in the past these knowledge fields have been deployed as gatekeepers. Our next generation of editors will draw on a range of disciplines and fields to bring feminism, queer studies, trans studies, and pre-modern critical race studies into the traditional toolkit of source study, historicism, theatre and performance, and printing history. As major new publishing series – including Arden 4 and the Cambridge Shakespeare Editions – are launched, this is an opportune time to move the discipline of textual editing forward.

Director: Emma Smith is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College Oxford, and author of works on the First Folio and on Shakespeare’s print reception. She is currently General Editor for the Oxford Worlds Classics Shakespeare and completing Twelfth Night for Arden 4.

Anticipated Schedule: Virtual monthly meetings on Thursday afternoons, 3:00–5:00 p.m. Eastern: September 7, October 12, and November 9, 2023; January 4, February 1, and March 7, 2024.

Apply: July 10, 2023, for admission and grants-in-aid to support travel and lodging for the in-person session. Please note that applicants need not be working on commissioned editorial projects; anyone who is interested in the texts used in scholarship and teaching, or in the ways future editing will be informed by current critical priorities, is encouraged to apply.

Co-directed by Herman L. Bennett, Julie Crawford, and Jenny C. Mann

This program focuses on the use of primary materials available for the study of the history, culture, society, and literature of early modern Britain, Europe, and the Atlantic World, broadly conceived. The goal throughout will be to foster interdisciplinary scholarship while considering broad methodological and theoretical problems relevant to current work in early modern studies, especially when working in fields that contain deliberate elisions and silences in their historical archives. Participants will visit the Folger and other DC-area special collections in the spring to explore a variety of printed and manuscript sources relevant to Ph.D. candidates in history and literature, and they will learn (with the support and assistance of Folger librarian and curatorial staff) essential research skills as well as strategies for working with digital resources and remediated rare materials. Preference will be given to applicants who have completed course work and preliminary exams; they should be preparing a prospectus or beginning to write chapters. Applicants should consult with their dissertation directors before applying to ensure that their work is at a stage that would benefit from the seminar, and their directors should certify that this is the case in their recommendation letters. Those whose dissertations are substantially complete will not be competitive applicants.

Directors: Herman L. Bennett is Professor at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and Director of the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean (IRADAC). Among his monographs are Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570–1640 (2003); Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico (2009); and African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty & Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic (2019). Julie Crawford is the Mark van Doren Professor of Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is the author of Marvelous Protestantism (2004), Mediatrix (2014), and numerous essays on authors ranging from Shakespeare to Anne Clifford and on topics ranging from the history of reading to the history of sexuality. She is currently completing a book manuscript entitled “Margaret Cavendish’s Political Career” and editing the Oxford Handbook of Margaret Cavendish. Jenny C. Mann is an Associate Professor of English at New York University with a joint appointment with NYU Gallatin. She has followed her first book, Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare’s England (2012), with The Trials of Orpheus: Poetry, Science, and the Early Modern Sublime (2021). Her current research project explores problems of self-reference in utopian literature from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century.

Anticipated Schedule: Participants will meet virtually over a Friday and Saturday, October 13-14, and early December 2023. In the spring, participants will travel to Washington, DC, on the following dates to conduct research at the Folger and other DC-area special collections that are relevant to their dissertation projects: February 16-17, April 19-20, and June 28-29, 2024.

Apply: July 10, 2023. This program is only open to Folger Institute Consortium affiliates.

Spring 2024

Organized by Hillary Eklund and Debapriya Sarkar

How can early modern literature, art, and philosophy help us expand the range of available models for just, situated creation? How might we rethink entanglements of mastery, power structures, and exceptionalism? What methods must we envision to engage ethically with intertwined formulations of race, place, and the nonhuman? This workshop invites scholars, teachers, artists, and activists to explore and interrupt the legacies of early modern racial and environmental injustice. Early modern ideas of racial and cultural difference were often linked to geography and climate. At the same time, categories of animality and monstrosity were used to dehumanize colonized people and inscribe upon their bodies the alienness of foreign geographies. To examine these intersections, we aim to bring the environmental humanities – with its tendency to focus on the physical world and center the nonhuman – into conversation with work on race and empire that exposes why the “human” is still too fraught a category for many kinds of decentering and reveals why considerations of place must attend to modes of habitation.

Organizers: Hillary Eklund is Associate Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans. She is the author of Literature and Moral Economy in the Early Modern Atlantic (2015), editor of Ground-Work: English Renaissance Literature and Soil Science (2017), and co-editor of Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare (2019). Recent work on the environmental humanities and empire appears in SEL, Criticism, and ELR. Debapriya Sarkar is Assistant Professor of English and Maritime Studies at University of Connecticut. She is the co-editor of “Imagining Early Modern Scientific Forms” (special issue, Philological Quarterly, 2019) and author of Possible Knowledge: The Literary Forms of Early Modern Science (2023). Her current research engages PCRS, ecocriticism, and postcolonial theory to examine the “disposable forms” pervading early modern writing.

Program and Presenters:  Malinda Maynor Lowery (Emory University) and Mónica Domínguez Torres (University of Delaware) will open the workshop with a plenary session on Thursday evening, May 16. Over Friday and Saturday, the following presenters will address four respective topics: Karen Ann Daniels (Folger Theatre and Folger Programming) and Carol Mejia-LaPerle (Wright State University) on Community Engagement; Laura Harjo (University of Oklahoma) and Ashley Sarpong (California State University, Stanislaus) on Scholarship; Vanessa M. Holden (University of Kentucky) and Kathryn Vomero Santos (Trinity University) on Public Humanities; and Olga Sánchez Saltveit (Middlebury College) and Brittany N. Williams (actress and author) on Art. Ruben Espinosa (Arizona State University), Davy Knittle (University of Delaware), and Lehua Yim (independent researcher) will serve as respondents during the course of the workshop.

Anticipated Schedule: Thursday evening, Friday, and Saturday, May 16-18, 2024, at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Apply: November 13, 2023. Please note that scholars, teachers, artists, and activists are welcome to apply.

Organized by Liza Blake

This symposium invites participants to take stock of the study of various literary forms as they intersect with the histories of natural philosophy and science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries before those fields were reified in the academy. Decades of work in this field have advanced beyond locating figurative language in “scientific” texts, or finding references to scientific ideas in, say, poetry, and are now investigating, for instance, how the question of form might cut across both literary and non-literary texts. Participants will be invited to present polemical manifestos sketching their visions for futures of the intersections of these three fields in the study of early modernity, especially as those fields take up questions of race, empire, gender, and sexuality. How, this symposium will ask, might the boundaries of all three modes of thinking and writing stretch, bend, or break when different voices and approaches are included in the “canon” of literature-science-and-philosophy?

Organizer: Liza Blake is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto, with research interests and publications in the intersections of early modern literature, philosophy, and science. She is currently completing a monograph entitled Early Modern Literary Physics, and she is one of three General Editors (with Jacob Tootalian and Shawn Moore) of The Complete Works of Margaret Cavendish.

Invited Presenters include Pavneet Singh Aulakh (Vanderbilt University), MacKenzie Cooley (Hamilton College), Su Fang Ng (Virginia Tech), Jennifer Park (University of Glasgow), Suparna Roychoudhury (Mount Holyoke College), Debapriya Sarkar (University of Connecticut), Whitney Sperrazza (Rochester Institute of Technology), Jacob Tootalian (Portland State University), Henry Turner (Rutgers University).

Anticipated Schedule: Thursday evening, Friday, and Saturday, May 30-June 1, 2024, at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Apply: November 13, 2023

Late-Spring 2024

Co-sponsored with the Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Directed by Heather Wolfe

This weeklong course provides an intensive introduction to handwriting in early modern England, with a particular emphasis on the English secretary hand of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Working from digitized and physical manuscripts, participants will be trained in the accurate reading and transcription of secretary, italic, and mixed hands. In conjunction with the Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies’ Renaissance of the Earth research program, the workshop’s focus will include estate accounts, annotated almanacs, and household inventories that showcase how early moderns were practically and imaginatively transforming the earth. The workshop’s focus will include recipe books, personal correspondence, and poetry miscellanies drawn from the Folger collection. Participants will experiment with contemporary writing materials (quills, iron gall ink, and paper); learn the terminology for describing and comparing letterforms; and become skillful decipherers of abbreviations, numbers, and dates. Transcriptions made by participants will become part of the Early Modern Manuscripts Online (EMMO) corpus.

Director: Heather Wolfe is Consulting Curator of Manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She was formerly Associate Librarian, co-director of the multi-year research project Before ‘Farm to Table’: Early Modern Foodways and Cultures, and principal investigator of Early Modern Manuscripts Online. Author of numerous articles on early modern manuscripts, Dr. Wolfe has edited The Literary Career and Legacy of Elizabeth Cary, 1613–1680 (2007), The Trevelyon Miscellany of 1608: A Facsimile Edition of Folger Shakespeare Library MS V.b.232 (2007), Letterwriting in Renaissance England (2004) (with Alan Stewart), and Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland: Life and Letters (2001). She is currently working on a book on early modern writing paper in England.

Anticipated Schedule: Monday through Friday, June 3-7, 2024, at the Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

 Apply: March 11, 2024 for admission and grants-in-aid for Folger Institute Consortium affiliates.

Summer 2024

Directed by Patricia Akhimie, Caroline Duroselle-Melish, Heather Wolfe, and Owen Williams

The best research is based on inquiry and allows for serendipity. A scholar needs to sharpen research questions and search skills simultaneously and with sensitivity to the ways questions and sources affect each other. The available evidence may invite a new thesis, require a revised approach, or even suggest a new field of exploration. This intensive week is not designed to advance participants’ individual research projects. Rather, it aims to cultivate the participants’ curiosity about primary resources by using exercises that engage their research interests. It is offered to help early-stage graduate students develop a set of research-oriented literacies as they explore the Folger Collections in ways that will be useful for navigating other collections. With the guidance of visiting faculty and curatorial staff from the Folger, twelve to fourteen participants will examine bibliographical tools and their logics, hone their early modern book description skills, learn best practices for organizing and working with digital images, and improve their understanding of the cultural and technological histories of texts. Participants will ask reflexive questions about the nature of primary sources, the collections that house them, and the tools whereby one can access them.

Anticipated Schedule: Tuesday through Saturday, August 6-10, 2024, at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Apply: March 11, 2024 for admission and grants-in-aid for Folger Institute Consortium affiliates.