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Jeanne Addison Roberts, founding scholar-director of the Folger’s Teaching Shakespeare Institute, is the recipient of the 2010 Shakespeare Steward Award.
Dr. Roberts began the Folger’s Teaching Shakespeare Institute, a four-week residential program on Shakespeare education that connects educators with scholars, theater professionals, and master teachers, in 1984 with Peggy O’Brien, then head of education at the Folger. Roberts served as head scholar from 1984–1986 and as a visiting scholar countless years after that.
“Like Abigail Adams reminding her husband to “remember the ladies,” Jeanne patiently and powerfully helped us to hack through the thickets of male-dominated criticism and teaching of Shakespeare to find new and more useful ways to think about the plays and especially the women in the plays,” noted Martha Harris, a TSI alum from the first Institute. “In her lectures she showed us how the forest of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was a place where matriarchy flourished (at least for a little while), and how the dark, constricted language in Macbeth feeds the tradition of burning women at the stake. She was providing us with powerful tools to both think about the plays and think about ourselves.”
A noted feminist scholar, Dr. Roberts is professor emeritus of literature at American University. She is the author of Shakespeare’s English Comedy: The Merry Wives of Windsor in Context, The Shakespearean Wild: Geography, Genus and Gender, and most recently, Literary Criticism as Dream Analysis. She has been president of the Southeast Renaissance Society and the Shakespeare Association of America. She holds degrees from Agnes Scott College, the University of Philadelphia, and the University of Virginia.
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