The Folger's world-class staff helps to maintain the Library's collections, assist researchers and scholars, manage Folger publications, and organize programs for teachers, students, and the public. Interested in joining our ranks? Work with us!
Director
Dr. Witmore was appointed the seventh director of the Folger on July 1, 2011. Upon his arrival, he worked with the Board of Governors to draft a Strategic Plan for the institution, adopted in June 2013. He was formerly professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and before that he served as associate professor of English and assistant professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University. The recipient of numerous fellowships, he has held an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of California, Los Angeles, a research fellowship and a curatorial residency fellowship at the Folger, and a predoctoral fellowship at the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin. He was awarded (but declined) an ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship for the academic year 2011-12. Dr. Witmore earned an A.B. in English at Vassar College, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. Among his more recent projects, he launched the Working Group for Digital Inquiry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and organized the Pittsburgh Consortium for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. His publications include numerous articles, website resources, and book chapters, and he has published five books: Landscapes of the Passing Strange: Reflections from Shakespeare, with Rosamond Purcell (2010), Shakespearean Metaphysics (2009), Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance (2007), Childhood and Children’s Books in Early Modern Europe, 1550-1800 (2006), and Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledge in Early Modern England (2001). In addition, he has given scores of presentations and been invited to serve on numerous academic panels. He currently has several books in progress, including a study of early modern wisdom literature and a book on the nature of digital inquiry in the humanities.
Administration
Chief Financial Officer
Ruth Taylor Kidd brings more than 25 years of experience in the non-profit sector to her role as Chief Financial Officer of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Appointed in September 2018, Ms. Taylor Kidd has extensive experience with museums, having served as the Vice President of Finance and Administration at the Capital Children’s Museum, Director of Budgeting and Planning at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Assistant Director of Development at the American Museum of Natural History. She also served as Chief Financial Officer for Ashoka, a non-profit whose mission is to cultivate and support social entrepreneurs throughout the globe. In addition to her internal positions, Ms. Taylor Kidd has served as a consultant to numerous small and mid-size non-profits in the Washington, DC Metro area where her work focused on budgeting, strategic planning, and process re-design.
Ms. Taylor Kidd holds a master’s degree in Public and Private Management (MPPM) from the Yale School of Management with concentrations in nonprofit management and marketing. She is a graduate of Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut where she received her BS in psychology. Ms. Taylor Kidd attended the Getty Leadership Institute’s Museum Management Institute. She is a member of the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) and ArtTable, a national organization for professional women in the visual arts.
Facilities
Associate Director of Facilities
Building Services Technician
Finance Office
Human Resources
Director of Talent and Culture
(202) 544-4600
Information Technology
Security
Head of Security and Safety
(202) 675-0394
(202) 675-0309
Full Time Security Officer
Part Time Security Officer
Full Time Security Officer
Part Time Security Officer
Special Police Officer
Part Time Security Officer
Part Time Security Officer
Full Time Security Officer
Part Time Security Officer
Special Police Officer
Part Time Security Officer
Special Police Officer
Full Time Security Officer
Special Police Officer
Collections
Eric Weinmann Librarian, Director of Collections
(202) 544-4600
Greg Prickman was appointed the Eric Weinmann Librarian and Director of Collections in July 2018. Previously he was head of Special Collections at the University of Iowa Libraries. Prickman came to the University of Iowa Libraries in 2006, working as a special collections librarian and then as the assistant head of Special Collections and University Archives before becoming the head of Special Collections in 2011. He was the instigator of DIY History (https://diyhistory.lib.uiowa.edu), a crowdsourcing transcription project for Civil War diaries and other digitized manuscripts, and the creator and lead developer of The Atlas of Early Printing (http://atlas.lib.uiowa.edu), a digital, publicly accessible map depicting the development of printing in Europe in the 15th century that uses GIS mapping. Under his leadership, acquisitions to the library's collections include the Gallup family papers, the Tom Brokaw papers, and the Brinton Collection of Early Film. He appears in a 2017 documentary featuring this collection entitled Saving Brinton (http://brintonfilm.com). He has also taught at the university's Center for the Book and School of Library and Information Services. Before Iowa, he worked at public, academic, and corporate libraries, including the Ebling Library at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Special Collections and Preservation Division of the Chicago Public Library. Prickman is a member of the Grolier Club and the Caxton Club, and serves on the International Working Group of the Bibliographical Society of America. He is a Director of the Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL) and is a member of the Board of Directors for the English Short-Title Catalog, North America (ESTC/NA). A 1994 graduate of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, Prickman majored in History and Studio Art with a printmaking focus. His MLS, with a specialization in Rare Books and Manuscripts, is from Indiana University.
Associate Librarian for Collection Care and Development and Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Early Modern Books and Prints
(202) 675-0356
Louis B. Thalheimer Associate Librarian for Researcher Services
(202) 548-8770
Associate Librarian for Collection Description and Imaging
(202) 675-0334
Collection Care and Development
Collection Description and Imaging
Researcher Services
Communication
Head of External Relations
(202) 675-0342
Development
Chief Advancement Officer
(202) 544-4600
Development Officer, Membership and Individual Giving
(202) 675–0359
Digital Media & Publications
Director of Digital Access
(202) 675-0345
Mr. Johnson joined the Library in April 2013 as the first Director of Digital Access. He manages the Folger's various digital programs, and oversees the journal Shakespeare Quarterly and Folger Editions series of Shakespeare's complete works. He became known to the Shakespearean community as the creator of Open Source Shakespeare, one of the most widely-used resources in the field. Before coming to the Folger, he developed successful online initiatives for a wide variety of public- and private-sector organizations. He holds an MA in English and a BA in history, and heads the board of advisors for the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at George Mason University. He is also a veteran of the US Marine Corps. Mr. Johnson has a distinguished track record of anticipating the digital use and dissemination of literary texts.
Shakespeare Quarterly
Assistant Director of Publications and Managing Editor, Shakespeare Quarterly
(202) 675-0347
Director's Office
Gift Shop
Shop Operations Manager
(202) 675-0364
Special Events
Education
Director of Education
(202) 675-0372
Dr. O’Brien was named the Folger’s director of education in May 2013. A former Folger educator, she established the Library’s education philosophy and the bulk of its programs in the 1980s and led the department until 1994, when she left to become director of education programs for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Concurrent with that appointment and in collaboration with Cambridge University Press and Georgetown University, she launched and published Shakespeare Magazine, a print and online magazine for teachers of Shakespeare. In 2000, she became Chief Operating Officer of KIKO: Knowledge In, Knowledge Out, Inc., an internet educational company and, a year later, was named Executive Director of the National Cable and Telecommunications Education Foundation. In 2004, she returned to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as senior vice president of education programming and services. Most recently, she was the chief of family and public engagement for D.C. public schools and a member of the Chancellor's leadership team. Dr. O'Brien earned an A.B. from Trinity College, an M.A. from Catholic University of America, and a Ph.D. from The American University. She serves on a variety of boards and advisory committees and is frequently called upon to delivery keynote addresses and papers. Among her publications are the Shakespeare Set Free series published by Simon and Schuster. Her long and distinguished career has brought her numerous awards and honors, including Doctor of Laws honoris causa from Trinity University, Doctor of Humane Letters honoris causa from Georgetown University, the Public Humanities Award from the D.C. Community Humanities Council, and the Folger Shakespeare Library’s 2008 Shakespeare Steward Award. Prior to her first appointment at the Folger, she spent a number of years teaching high school English in the DC Public Schools, and since then has taught undergraduate courses at Georgetown University.
Senior Consultant
Folger Institute
Executive Director of the Folger Institute
(202) 675-0346
Kathleen Lynch earned her PhD in English literature from the University of Pittsburgh. She joined the Folger Institute as program administrator in 1992 and became its executive director in 1996. In 2013, the Folger Institute became a department at the Folger Shakespeare Library, expanding to encompass residential fellowships and collaborative research projects, as well as scholarly programs. Dr. Lynch’s own research interests can be broadly defined as the formation of knowledge communities, including transatlantic networks, with a focus on the methodologies of association among religious nonconformists. She studies the effects of regulations of religion and the book trade on devotional literature and identities. Her book, Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World (Oxford UP, 2012) was awarded the triennial Richard L. Greaves prize by the International John Bunyan Society. Among Dr. Lynch’s many scholarly articles are “Staging New Worlds: Place and Le Theatre de Neptune” in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies and “Devotion Bound: A Social History of The Temple,” in Books and Readers in Early Modern England (edited by Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer for the University of Pennsylvania Press). Her recent articles include “ ‘Letting a Room in London-House’: A Place for Dissent in Civil War London,” in a volume of essays, Church Life, edited by Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page, and Joel Halcomb (Oxford University Press, 2019). Dr. Lynch has been the recipient of several fellowships, presented papers at dozens of conferences and seminars, and organized conference sessions for the Shakespeare Association of America, the Modern Language Association, and the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing, among other scholarly associations. She has overseen the Institute’s consortium of member universities and served as project director for a number of NEH summer institutes at the Folger. She curated the summer 2012 Folger exhibition, Open City: London, 1500–1700.
Programming and Performance
Director Of Programming and Artistic Director, Folger Theatre
(202) 544-4600
Pronouns: she/her
Preferred name: Karen Ann
Before joining the Folger as the Director of Programming/Artistic Director of Folger Theatre in 2021, Karen Ann Daniels was director of the Mobile Unit at The Public Theater in NYC, touring Mobile Unit productions across all five boroughs of NY and launching new programs such as Mobile Unit In Corrections which brings the tools of theater into the lives of incarcerated communities. In her prior role as the associate director of The Old Globe’s Arts Engagement department, she managed community partnerships, and created, piloted and implemented cornerstone programs such as Globe for All, coLAB (devising plays with and for community), Community Voices (community as playwright) and Reflecting Shakespeare (Shakespeare in corrections). She served as composer/lyricist/collaborating playwright for gather ‘round, which premiered online at St Mary’s College in April 2021. In 2019, her new musical The Ruby in Us premiered as part of The Old Globe coLAB project, which she co-created with the Fourth District Seniors Resource Center in San Diego.
She is a 2021 Fellow at the Atlantic Fellows on Racial Equity, a network of leaders from the US and South Africa working to deepen their personal leadership and build expansive new futures in which Black people, and all people of colour, are seen, valued and respected. She served as chair of the City of Chula Vista’s Cultural Arts Commission, held a seat on the Leadership of the New California Arts Fund Leadership committee and was co-chair of the Learning Committee, representing the future of arts engagement for a cross-section of California arts organizations, through The James Irvine Foundation. She is also a co-producer and facilitator for the Biannual Shakespeare in Prisons Conference and Network.
She holds a BA in Art History from UCLA, an MFA in Musical Theater from San Diego State University and a certificate in Shakespeare from the British American Drama Academy.
Photo courtesy of Garlia Cornelia Jones
Associate Director of Public Programs and Associate Artistic Producer
(202) 675-0388
