Current and Upcoming Folger Institute Scholarly Programs

Updated May 2, 2025

Since our founding in 1970, the Folger Institute has relied on our Consortium university partners and their representatives to plan, implement, and oversee our Folger Institute Scholarly Programs. We thank them for their ongoing collaboration.

Below are the descriptions for the Scholarly Programs on offer during 2025-2026. We have once again embraced a mix of in-person and combined mode programming across a wide range of topics, with an eye on reducing or eliminating barriers to inclusion as often as possible. Some programs offer virtual sessions interspersed between sessions held at the Folger. Most require applications from those hoping to participate; this ensures that those selected and funded to attend will be strong contributors to the conversation. The application deadlines are specified below with links to the application guidelines.

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 by addressing the specific overlap between the program’s description and what the applicant hopes to gain and to give through participation. Please visit Apply for Scholarly Programs for further details about the application process. If you have any questions about these programs, or the logistics of applying, email us at institute@folger.edu.

If you have an idea for a program, we anticipate continuing our recent practice of encouraging program proposals from scholars who want to offer a program at the Folger or on a Consortium university campus. The latter should take advantage of unique, localized knowledge, underexplored archives, and diverse communities of inquiry and practice. A process to submit proposals is available on Folgerpedia.

For updates to programs and reminders about application deadlines, please subscribe to the bi-monthly newsletter, the Folger Research Bulletin.

Please note: program application portals will open one month before the application deadline, and decisions are typically announced within a month of that deadline.

Yearlong 2025-2026

Sponsored by the Center for Shakespeare Studies

Convened by Patricia Akhimie (Folger Institute) and Karen Ann Daniels (Folger Theatre) 

The history of America can be told through its representation of Black women, and perhaps nowhere more complexly than at the cultural center of Anglophone theatre, Shakespeare. The cultural roles — as exotic objects, caretakers, and servants — “allowed” to Black women from the Antebellum period to today were often negotiated through their inclusion on stage. This experimental series of linked workshops invites theatre-makers, practitioners, and scholars to explore this history and presence. The archives, both institutional and personal, through which these histories are accessed are few, often precarious, and resistant to traditional theatre history approaches. Yet researchers have developed dynamic methodologies for recovering these histories and incorporating them into new creative work to inform and invigorate contemporary theatre practice and remake the roles Black women embody in American society. By giving voice to these women’s experiences, the participants will work together to create new possibilities for the Shakespearean stage and our understanding of it. Expert faculty will advise teams of investigators as they explore a variety of archives seeking to recover records and experiences of Black women as actors, directors, designers, and playwrights. Theatre-makers, theatre practitioners, dramaturgs, actors, and theatre historians are encouraged to apply.

Co-directors: Patricia Akhimie is the Director of the Folger Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Director of the RaceB4Race Mentorship Network, and an Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University. She is the editor of the Arden Othello (4th series) and of The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race (2024) and the author of “Shakespeare and the Mixed-Race Family in José Esquea’s The Taming of the Shrew” (2020), “Strange Episodes: Race in Stage History” (2009) and Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World (2020). Karen Ann Daniels is a multi-hyphenate artist: producer, singer, songwriter, actor, stage director, and playwright. Her creative work has focused on co-creation as a composer/lyricist/playwright for musicals The Ruby in Us, centering the lives and stories of first-generation black women who endured the desegregation of schools, and gather ‘round, original songs weaving together the stories of college students surviving the pandemic in a chat room. She co-authored the Folger-commissioned Our Verse in Time to Come with Hip-Hop artist and writer Malik Work, commemorating the 400th Anniversary of Shakespeare’s first folio by creating a contemporary story mixing Hip-Hop, Shakespeare, and song. She is currently working on a new musical inspired by Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, The Beatrice Project, which examines archetypes of black femininity and autonomy through the lens of 1980s music videos. She is the Artistic Director of Folger Theatre and the Director of Artistic Programs.

Visiting faculty will be announced in the coming weeks.

Anticipated schedule: Fridays, 10:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., September 26, December 12, 2025; February 27, April 17, 2026, in conjunction with the Shakespeare Birthday Lecture. The December and February sessions will be virtual. All admitted participants will be invited to attend the annual Reading Room Festival in late January 2026.

Apply by July 14, 2025. We anticipate admitting eight participants, half theatre-makers or practitioners and half theatre or performance historians, who will be paired for their investigations and final presentations. With the partial support of Folger Artistic Research Fellowships, each admitted participant will receive $4,000 to support their travel and lodging.

Directed by Jenny C. Mann (New York University) and Nicholas Popper (William & Mary)

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:  Jenny C. Mann is Professor of English at New York University. She 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 is titled “The Forms of Utopia: Paradox, Labyrinth, and Recursion in the Renaissance.” Nicholas Popper is Professor of History at William & Mary. He is the author of Walter Ralegh’s History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance (2012) and The Specter of the Archive: Political Practice and the Information State in Early Modern Britain (2024). He is currently beginning a project on heraldic practices and social differentiation in early modern Britain.

Anticipated Schedule: Six Thursday afternoons, 1 to 4:30 p.m. Eastern, from September through June: September 18, October 16, December 11, 2025; February 26, March 26, and May 14, 2026. Admitted participants will receive two nights of lodging per in-person meeting and are expected to use that Friday to conduct research at the Folger Shakespeare Library and other DC-area collections. The February and March sessions will be virtual.

Apply by July 14, 2025, for admission and grants-in-aid for Folger Institute Consortium affiliates. The program is restricted to Consortium affiliates only.

Fall 2025

Directed by Carla Della Gatta (University of Maryland) and Gina Di Salvo (University of Tennessee)

This symposium explores performance research for the benefit of premodern scholars at all career stages. As our field continues to experience a turn towards performance—criticism, history, and practice—this symposium considers foundational and innovative research approaches in Theatre Studies and Performance Studies. Sessions will address recent shifts in performance methods (modes for gathering information) and methodologies (modes for analyzing information). Research topics include Shakespeare and other dramatists, as well as non-dramatic sites of performance such as ritual, ceremony, and cultural practices. This symposium aims to provoke and foster conversation about performance methodologies. Sessions will explore ethics and standards for researching simultaneous media sites (i.e., live theatre vs. live streaming theatre vs. digital media); practice-as-research and ethnography; established and emerging theories and vocabularies of performance research; and categories of performance. The symposium will utilize the Folger’s holdings of dramatic literature and historical records as primary documents and will also include a session on dramaturgy intended for all participants, from established scholar-practitioners to newly interested premodern scholars.

Directors: Carla Della Gatta is Associate Professor of Theatre Scholarship and Performance Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of Latinx Shakespeares: Staging U.S. Intracultural Theater (2023) and co-editor of Shakespeare and Latinidad (2021). She serves on the Steering Committee of the Latinx Theatre Commons. Gina Di Salvo is Associate Professor of Theatre and Associate Director of the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Tennessee. She is the author of The Renaissance of the Saints After Reform (2023) and currently serves as Associate Editor of Theatre Survey.  

Invited Speakers: Joseph Roach (Yale University, emeritus) will deliver the plenary lecture on Thursday evening. The following presenters will initiate conversations on the themes above: Misty G. Anderson (University of Tennessee); Leo Cabranes-Grant (University of California, Santa Barbara); Lezlie Cross (Guthrie Theater); Julia Fawcett (University of California, Berkeley); Barbara Fuchs (UCLA); Musa Gurnis (The Private Theatre); Douglas A. Jones, Jr. (Duke University); Erika T. Lin (CUNY Graduate Center); Matthew Sergi (University of Toronto); Andrew Sofer (Boston College); Emma Whipday (Newcastle University); and Patricia Ybarra (Brown University).

Anticipated Schedule: Thursday evening, Friday, and Saturday, October 23-25, 2025

Apply by July 14, 2025, for admission and grants-in-aid for Folger Institute Consortium affiliates.

Directed by Heather Wolfe (Folger Shakespeare Library)

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, December 2-6, 2025.

Apply by July 14, 2025, for admission and grants-in-aid for Folger Institute Consortium affiliates. In addition to graduate students of all stages and faculty who need to develop a facility with English handwriting, this skills course will consider applications from Folger Institute Consortium seniors who plan to enter graduate school soon.

Spring 2026

Directed by Christina H. Lee (Princeton University) and Lisa Voigt (Yale University)

The study of the early modern Iberian world has long recognized Spain and Portugal’s unprecedented overseas expansion, but in recent years scholarship has shifted focus to the global networks involving Iberia, Asia, the Americas, and Africa, as well as the transculturation resulting from the new contacts, often marked by conflict and violence. This research challenges Eurocentric narratives of discovery, conquest, evangelization, and civilization, and explores previously overlooked or entangled forms of cultural production. This workshop invites graduate students and early-career scholars who are working on projects (an article, dissertation, or book manuscript) that seek to open up new directions in or engage with new approaches to the study of the early modern Iberian world. Over the course of two days, each participant will present portions of their selected work-in-progress, lead discussions on one of their objects of analysis (any form of cultural production including text, visual art, and performance), and circulate and discuss their project’s abstract. They will receive feedback from both workshop leaders and fellow participants.

Directors: Christina H. Lee is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University. She is the author of Saints of Resistance: Devotions in the Philippines under Early Spanish Rule (2021). She has edited or co-edited several collections, including Western Visions of the Far East in a Transpacific Age (2012, 2017) and The Spanish Pacific, 1521-1815: A Reader of Primary Sources (2020 and 2024). She is also the co-director of A Digital Repatriation of a Lost Archive of the Spanish Pacific: The Library of the Convent of San Pablo (Manila, 1762), with Cristina Juan. Lisa Voigt is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University. She is the author of Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds (2009) and Spectacular Wealth: The Festivals of Colonial South American Mining Towns (2016). She is currently co-authoring a book with art historian Stephanie Leitch about early modern copied and recycled illustrations of the extra-European world.

Anticipated Schedule: Friday and Saturday, January 30 and 31, 2026.

Apply by October 20, 2025, for admission and grants-in-aid for Folger Institute Consortium affiliates.

Sponsored by the Center for Early Modern Political Thought 

The recovery of Afro-British writing has been one of the signal achievements of recent scholarship. Works by authors such as Ottobah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, Ignatius Sancho, and Phyllis Wheatley are now canonical in early modern scholarship and are increasingly studied for their political and philosophical content. By bringing together intellectual historians, literary scholars, philosophers, historians of slavery, and book historians, this conference will offer the first comprehensive overview of early modern Afro-British political thought in all its theoretical, textual, and material dimensions.

Organizers: The Steering Committee of the Center for Early Modern Political Thought: Nigel Smith, Chair (Princeton University); Sharon Achinstein (Johns Hopkins University); David Armitage (Harvard University); Jennifer L. Morgan (New York University); and Julia Rudolph (North Carolina State University)

Invited Speakers: Catherine Hall (University College of London, Emerita) will open the conference with a Thursday evening plenary presentation on the history and future of Afro-British writing and thought. Over Friday and Saturday, the following presenters will address four respective topics:  Urvashi Chakravarty (University of Toronto), Surya Parekh (Binghamton University, SUNY), and Keidrick Roy (Harvard University) on the Afro-British Enlightenment; Johan Olsthoorn (University of Amsterdam) and Jennifer Pitts (The University of Chicago) on the political thought of Ottobah Cugoano; Michael Suarez (University of Virginia) and Faramerz Dabhoiwala (Princeton University) on Paint, Print, and Political Thought with a response from Mary Elliott (National Museum of African American History and Culture); Vincent Carretta (University of Maryland, Emerita) and Adam Potkay (William & Mary) for a roundtable on the Impact of Anthologies; David Waldstreicher (CUNY Graduate Center) on Genre and Afro-British Political Thought; and Meleisa Ono-George (University of Oxford) and Carrie Shanafelt (Yeshiva University) for a roundtable on Beyond Afro-British Political Thought.

Anticipated Schedule: Thursday evening through Saturday, February 12-14, 2026.

Apply by October 20, 2025, for admission and grants-in-aid for Folger Institute Consortium affiliates.

Directed by Jessica Otis (George Mason University) and Jacqueline D. Wernimont (Dartmouth College)

Numbers are everywhere in early modern artifacts. Surviving physical objects, inventories, and literary references attest to a robust material culture of numeracy; basic mathematical skills may have been more widespread than literacy in early modern England. Written numbers appear in texts ranging from account books and parish registers to sermons and plays. Numbers were used to mark time, plan textiles, count the dead, navigate the globe, create music, surveil religious minorities, predict the future, and more. Although numbers were nearly ubiquitous, they were also highly contested in taverns, on London’s streets, at markets, in halls of governance, and in colonial outposts. Early modern people found comfort in threes, fought about irrational numbers and infinity, and were suspicious of zero and downright terrified of negative numbers. We invite all who are curious and/or confounded by numbers to apply to this weekend crash course in the rich texts and contexts of early modern numbers.

Directors: Jessica Otis is Director of Public Projects at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and an Associate Professor of History at George Mason University. Her first book, By the Numbers: Numeracy, Religion, and the Quantitative Transformation of Early Modern England, was published in 2024. Jacqueline D. Wernimont is Distinguished Chair of Digital Humanities and Social Engagement and an Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Dartmouth College. Her books include Numbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media (2018) and the co-edited Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities (with Elizabeth Losh, 2018).

Anticipated Schedule: Friday and Saturday, March 13 and 14, 2026.

Apply by October 20, 2025, for admission and grants-in-aid for Folger Institute Consortium affiliates.

Directed by Bernadette Andrea (University of California, Santa Barbara) and M. Lindsay Kaplan (Georgetown University)

As the English sought to establish financial and territorial dominance around the globe, encounters with geographical others revealed a range of cultural differences that included divergence of faith. Approaching the longue durée of the premodern period through the optic of religion—conceived as culture, race, law, spirituality, and theology—this symposium focuses on non-Christian religions as they shaped the English imaginary in Britain and the broader Anglosphere. The persisting centrality of religion as an organizing episteme in the period, the long-standing theological and literary discourses defining non-Christians, such as pagans, Jews, and Muslims, and the fragmenting of Christian identity in the wake of the Reformation led to curiosity, engagement, and conflict. Brief presentations will instigate conversations on a range of non-Christian religious identities—including those of Jewish, Muslim, and Indigenous peoples—especially in relationship to proto-national and racial identity formation and nascent colonial projects.

Directors: Bernadette Andrea is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is also affiliated with the Center for Middle East Studies 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 (2017) and Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature (2007). She has served as a co-editor of Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal (2017–2024) and as the President of the Shakespeare Association of America (2022–2023). M. Lindsay Kaplan, Professor of English at Georgetown University, teaches and writes on race in medieval and early modern theology and literature. Her most recent books include Figuring Racism in Medieval Christianity (2019) and The Merchant of Venice: The State of Play (2020). Her current project examines the racialized coordination of Jews and Muslims in medieval Christianity, tracing its persistence in early modern English drama.

Invited Speakers: The program will open on Wednesday evening with a plenary session by Shari Rabin (Oberlin College) and Jyotsna Singh (Michigan State University). The following speakers will present on Thursday and Friday: Adulhamit Arvas (University of Pennsylvania), Nat Cutter (University of Melbourne), Ambereen Dadabhoy (Harvey Mudd College), Colby Gordon (Bryn Mawr College), Evan Haefeli (Texas A&M University), Sheiba Kian Kaufman (Saddleback College), John Kuhn (Binghamton University, SUNY), Lisa Lampert-Weissig (University of California, San Diego), Jamie Paris (University of Manitoba), and Ella Schalski (The George Washington University).

Anticipated Schedule: Wednesday evening, Thursday, and Friday, March 25-27, 2026.

Apply by October 20, 2025, for admission and grants-in-aid for Folger Institute Consortium affiliates.

Late-Spring 2026

Directed by Vin Nardizzi (University of British Columbia)

Most modern consumers no longer know where vegetables grow. Plant Humanities is a multidisciplinary field that challenges the cultural abjection of plant life in modernity and corrects what educators diagnose as the West’s constitutional “plant blindness.” Against this paradigm, participants in this seminar will explore the idea that early moderns were profoundly plant attentive. Shakespeare’s contemporaries gathered plants for medicine and subsistence; botany was a growth field; and the intended and inadvertent movement of plants during “The Columbian Exchange” permanently altered ecosystems, culinary habits, medicinal practices, and culture on both sides of the Atlantic. Twelve to fourteen inter- and multidisciplinary participants will explore the verbal and visual technologies and the erudite and quotidian traces of how early moderns attended to plants and will receive feedback on works-in-progress. The Folger’s polyglot Mary P. Massey Collections is our shared corpus.

Director: Vin Nardizzi is Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia. Marvellous Vegetables in the English Renaissance (2025) excavates plant natural history as a vital resource for reimagining categories of embodiment. His new project, “Thomasin Tunstall: A Botanical Biography,” spotlights a highly annotated volume in the Folger’s collections to reframe narratives about the use of early modern English herbals.

Invited Speakers: A keynote session featuring presentations by Saskia Cornes (Duke University), John Slater (Colorado State University), and Phillip John Usher (New York University) will offer a comparative view on early modern plant matters.

Anticipated Schedule: Thursday evening through Saturday, May 21-23, 2026. Seminar participants will enjoy an excursion to the gardens and collections of Dumbarton Oaks.

 Apply by March 2, 2026, for admission and grants-in-aid for Folger Institute Consortium affiliates.

Directed by Elisa Oh (Howard University)

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 5-9, 2025, at the Folger Shakespeare Library.