The Folger Institute is a center for advanced research in the early modern humanities at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Founded in 1970, the Institute gathers interdisciplinary communities of scholars for collections-based research. The Institute sets agendas, models best practices, and tests new methods for scholarship. Together with colleagues around the Folger, the Institute seeks to bring public audiences together with scholarly ones as we discover more about the cultures and legacies of the early modern world.
Scholarly Programs
Folger Institute scholarly programs gather advanced scholars—from early stage graduate students to faculty—to work together around specific topics relating to the history and literature of early modern Europe and the British Isles.
Fellowships
Folger Institute fellowships support individual scholarly and artistic research that enriches and expands our understanding of the early modern world. We aim to ensure equitable access to research funding by offering multiple fellowship modules and removing barriers to fellowship participation.
Public Humanities
Folger Institute Public Humanities bring together anyone with an interest in the early modern world with researchers in order to explore the cultures and legacies of that time. We offer programs, resources, and activities that connect the past with the present in meaningful and engaging ways.
The Institute supports the curiosity-driven hunches that send scholars to our archives for evidence and to the Folger’s community spaces for discussion and feedback. Institute offerings facilitate the concentrated work of reading and writing, and provide access to modern scholarship, digital resources, and sociable spaces for trial and redirection and recommitment. We take seriously the questions that interrupt received wisdom, exceed easy answers, and open the scope of our understanding of early modernity with all its resonances in our own conflicted world.
About the Folger Institute
The Folger Institute strongly believes that knowledge creation is the product of expansive and diverse intellectual communities, and we take seriously our mission to set agendas and standards for research in the humanities.
Code of Professional Conduct
The Folger Institute creates unique opportunities for scholars from many different career stages to share their works-in-progress in ever-shifting communities of intellectual inquiry.
Undergraduate Research
Undergraduate students can access the Folger collections by applying for special reading privileges or by coming as part of a class visit.
Learn more about the Institute’s work
Folger Institute Mixology
Our “Mixology” series draws on the Folger’s rich collection of handwritten recipe books from early modern Britain—the largest in the world—to examine the early modern era and connect it with the present.
“I have lately been promoted to the ‘big douche’”
Through her correspondence, Delia Salter Bacon reveals what it was like to undergo a 19th century “water-cure”
Performing Race in the London Lord Mayors’ Show, 1660-1708
Fellow Jamie Gemmell explores how race was performed in the annual London Lord Mayor’s Show
Medicinal Plants, Colonial Weeds, and Biodiversity Loss
Herbarius: A New Herbal for the Anthropocene, by 2024-25 artist research fellow Suzette Marie Martin, is a “deconstructed manuscript” series of paintings that traces the intercontinental dispersal of non-native plant species through formerly valued medicinal herbs, now despised as weeds.