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The Folger Institute

Early modern print of a scholar working in a cluttered room

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.

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.

Learn more about the Institute’s work

Convivial Cleopatra
A woman lounging on a couch hold the head of a woman leaning against the couch
Collation

Convivial Cleopatra

Posted
Author
Mira 'Assaf

An examination of Cleopatra’s racialized and sexualized queenship through the twinned theoretical frameworks of indigenous and queer conviviality

Welcome to the Banquet
The title of the manuscript in a elaborate loopy italic hand
Collation

Welcome to the Banquet

Posted
Author
Douglas Clark

Fellow Douglas Clark delves into the contents of the previously overlooked manuscript, Thomas Grocer’s Banquet of Sweetmeats.

Race B4 Race 2024 Seminar 1: What We’re Reading and Why
Cover of the book Shakespeare Through Islamic Worlds
Collation

Race B4 Race 2024 Seminar 1: What We’re Reading and Why

Posted
Author
Kavita Mudan Finn

In a continuation of a series, a member of the RaceB4Race Mentorship Network discusses what they’re reading and thinking about in their monthly Reading Group.