2025-26 Long-term Fellow

Fugitive Poetics: Refugee Writing and the Matter of Troy

My project examines how contemporary anglophone poets of color use myths of Britain’s founding by Trojan refugees to craft their own stories of displacement and new beginnings. Juxtaposing materials at the Folger (incunabula and early modern printed texts) with modern poetry and audiovisual media, this project explores how refugee poets around the globe draw inspiration from Chaucer and Shakespeare to rethink collective memory and build dynamic communities. My comparative methods advance Medieval and Early Modern Studies while engaging Contemporary Poetics, Ethnic Studies, and Migration Studies.

2025-26 Long-term Fellow

Transit and the Early Caribbean

This project examines the relationship between diverse forms of travel, mapping, and the body in forming the early Caribbean as a geography of transit. With particular attention to the effects of of England and Spain’s respective and overlapping exercises of power in the region, I examine what new social formations of mobility emerge in the “New World” of the seventeenth century. I intend to explore how travel itself simultaneously provides access to and limitation upon notions of freedom that shape these nations’ approach to power in lasting ways, as well as offers profound avenues for self-definition for people moving in and out of the “New World.”

2025-26 Long-term Fellow

Distinguishing Race: Performing Knowledge in Early Modern Comedy

I am currently working on my first monograph, tentatively titled, Distinguishing Race: Performing Knowledge in Early Modern Comedy. My project traces how developments in comic conventions on the early modern English stage reflect and produce a logic of race. By examining pastoral romantic comedies, city comedies, satirical plays, and tragicomedies in the 16th and 17th centuries, I argue that playwrights advance a comic racial form which structurally precludes the ignorant from ever discerning the sanctioned tenets of knowledge within their play-world. Distinguishing Race thus offers a model to think through how early modern English comedies re-negotiate what it means to ‘know,’ and further, how they interrogate a racialization of knowledge itself.

2025-26 Long-term Fellow

Chaucer’s Black London

In November 2023, the UK minister Kemi Badenoch lodged a formal complaint against the Museum of London about an article I collaboratively published with several bioanthropologists and a bioarchaeologist. Her complaint called the work documenting the presence of fourteenth-century, London Black communities “woke archaeology.” We observed within our fields a systematic methodological whitewashing of the entire Western European medieval population record. No grave sites, other than our study’s two London sites, have been analyzed to determine the race of those buried. Scholars had assumed everyone was white. Similarly, in medieval legal records, there has been almost no discussion of several court documents that describe the everyday Black lives in medieval England.

2025-26 Long-term Fellow

Tuning the Body: Musical Health Regimens in Early Modern England

Tuning the Body: Musical Health Regimens in Early Modern England is a cultural history of music’s use in routines of domestic healthcare. Employing approaches from music studies, book history and the history of medicine, this project analyzes a corpus unknown to musicology: music collected in early modern recipe books alongside medicines and food in the seventeenth-century Anglosphere. These carefully curated collections of musical and medicinal materials are, I argue, evidence of music’s role in everyday household care, an opaque domain whose study not only sheds light on how music actually functioned as medicinal beyond its theoretical healing powers, but also gives us rare access to the little understood musico-medical practices of women and household servants.

2025-26 Long-term Fellow

The Insular Globe: Animals and Landscapes of Colonization, Ireland c. 700-1700

My book project combines historical, archaeological, and geographical evidence to argue that people maintained a complex and exploitative relationship with their natural environment long before modernity. I use animal experiences to explore how environmental change was created by colonial activity. Animal encounters with colonization document a deeply embedded and symbiotic relationship with humans in the pre-modern world. Ultimately, I explain that our long-ago past with animals shapes how we interact with the environment today.

2025-26 Long-term Fellow

In a Violent Manner: Sodomy, Same-Gender Sexual Violence and the English Law, c. 1600-1800

My project is the first monographic study of sodomy in early modern England to focus on sexual violence. It starts with a legal conundrum: sodomy laws did not distinguish between consensual and non-consensual acts of sodomy, and this conceptualization rendered all parties—whether consenting or not—as legally culpable and therefore punishable. Despite this, my research finds that men and boys frequently chanced self-incrimination and approached common law and naval courts to charge assailants of coercively sodomizing them. In so doing, they fought for redress and the recognition of their victimhood before legal practitioners. I argue that men and boys’ accusations of violence, and the courts’ responses to them, elucidate the nature of legal sexual victimhood in early modern England.

2025-26 Long-term Fellow

Much Depends on Dinner: Early Modern Foodways, Performance, and Dramatic Representation

My project brings together the fields of early modern, food history, theatre and performance, and race studies in an interdisciplinary approach to the study of literature and drama in which foodways “perform” in a process of colonial categorization that is still relevant in contemporary politics of identity and race.

2025-26 Long-term Public Humanities Fellow

Linguistic Hierarchies: Gullah-Geechee x Shakespearean English (What Language Remembers)

What Language Remembers is an interdisciplinary exploration of the historical, performative, and linguistic intersections between Gullah-Geechee and Shakespearean English, aimed at elevating the Gullah-Geechee tradition through a critical lens. Drawing on historical research, linguistic and phonetic analysis, and storytelling practices, the project highlights how both systems—one shaped by the survival strategies of enslaved Africans, the other by the literary ambitions of Renaissance England – use rhythm, tone, and narrative to transmit identity, memory, and resistance.

2025-26 Long-term Public Humanities Fellow

Linguistic Hierarchies: Gullah-Geechee x Shakespearean English (What Language Remembers)

What Language Remembers is an interdisciplinary exploration of the historical, performative, and linguistic intersections between Gullah-Geechee and Shakespearean English, aimed at elevating the Gullah-Geechee tradition through a critical lens. Drawing on historical research, linguistic and phonetic analysis, and storytelling practices, the project highlights how both systems—one shaped by the survival strategies of enslaved Africans, the other by the literary ambitions of Renaissance England – use rhythm, tone, and narrative to transmit identity, memory, and resistance.

2025-26 Artistic Research Fellow

Hamlet on the Atlantic: A Performance by a Chorus of Ghosts, Immigrants, and Refugees

2025-26 Artistic Research Fellow

Hemba

A retelling of Hamlet based on Laura Bohannan’s encounter with the Tiv tribe which she details in her seminal Shakespeare in the Bush. The lyrical epic will explore madness and the supernatural through the lens of Tiv cosmology, which the Tiv people she encountered had workshopped the narrative. Hemba will be set in the time of this encounter, and interrogate the kingship structures that were unnatural to the culture and introduced in the colonial rule.

2025-26 Artistic Research Fellow

Linguistic Continuums: Gullah-Geechee and Shakespearean English – Reframing Linguistic Hierarchies

2025-26 Artistic Research Fellow

The Ball

The Ball is a feature length historical narrative that centers on the first Black debutante ball, which took place in 1778 in New York. The film explores the intersection of race, gender, and class in colonial America told through the eyes of a young free African-American woman, shedding light on the complexities of Black identity during a pivotal period in American history. By delving into the stories of free and enslaved Black communities in pre-Revolutionary New York, The Ball seeks to illuminate a largely forgotten chapter of Black cultural resistance and self-definition. The project not only examines the historical significance of the debutante ball but also highlights the enduring legacy of Black cultural traditions and their impact on contemporary society.

2025-26 Artistic Research Fellow

Early Modern Narratives of Expansion in the North Atlantic Cod Fishery

Through the narratives of the North Atlantic cod fishery, this novel in progress examines how ideology formation in the wake of ecological and economic busts. Research at the Folger will look back into the fifteen through seventeenth centuries for the impetus of a growing commercial desire for cod, studying the early seeds of colonial expansion and subsequent unsustainable ecological extraction.

2025-26 Artistic Research Fellow

The Mask of Blackness: An Epic Fantasia on Beauty, Power, and Imagined Otherness

The Mask of Blackness: an Epic Fantasia on Beauty, Power, and Imagined Otherness is both a single large-scale immersive theater experience, and an organizing conceptual framework for a series of smaller-scale global events that reimagine Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones’ The Masque of Blackness (1605) as a medium through which to confront questions and problems related to its content, theatrical form and historical legacy.

2025-26 Artistic Research Fellow

Performing Blackwork Embroidery

Researching the pictorial and textual evidence of embroidery in the Folger Library, and the lives of women who practiced this art form at the time, as inspiration for my own embroidery resulting in the design of an article of clothing. Additional time to perform the practice of freeform blackwork embroidery in the public space of the library itself.

2025-26 Artistic Research Fellow

New Songs of Sepharad: Tracing Histories, Sounding the Sephardi Past

This project is an artistic research investigation into the world surrounding Sephardi life during the height of the Ottoman period. Through archival inquiry and cultural memory, it draws out imagery and narrative threads that will inform a new album of original music in the Sephardi Ladino language.

2025-26 Artistic Research Fellow

“Shakespeare’s My Generational Curse”: From Colonial Tool to Cultural Expression

My project examines how Shakespeare’s works evolved into vehicles for cultural liberation in Sierra Leone, particularly through Thomas Decker’s 1960s Krio translations Juliohs Siza (Julius Caesar) and Udap Di Kyap Fit (As You Like It). Through archival research, cultural interviews, and performance development, I will trace the theatrical lineage to connect classical texts with indigenous practices of gender affirmation. I hope to produce a dramaturgical report and solo performance piece exploring how communities reclaim inherited cultural practices.

Drawing on my experience as a first-generation Sierra Leonean artist and a Mercury Store Acting Company member, this work reveals how fundamental human narratives transcend borders while honoring the idiosyncrasies of cultural specificity, ultimately creating resources for scholars and practitioners navigating the intersection of classical texts and cultural identity.

2025-26 Artistic Research Fellow

Herbal Memory: Shakespeare, Botanicals and the Plantationocene

My project aims to reveal and respond to Shakespeare’s botanical entanglements. Using Shakespeare’s botanical references as a springboard — he refers in his collected works to over 180 plant species — I will dive into the library’s rich collection of herbals published during and around his lifetime. Through the production of an essay film, speculative texts and drawings responding to the library’s collections, I will ask: how might Early Modern characterisations of plant-life in these herbals might complicate and challenge traditional hierarchies of Western thought? In our current context of ecological crisis, could the knowledge contained in herbals — pre-systematised, a melding together of indigenous and traditional knowledge, scientific discourse and fabulation — help us to imagine new ways of being and modes of embodiment?

2025-26 Artistic Research Fellow

The Black Saint

The Black Saint investigates the life and legacy of Saint Benedict the Moor, one of the first Black individuals to be canonized by the Catholic Church. Born in Sicily to enslaved African parents in the 1500s, his rise to sainthood and his veneration, particularly by African American Catholics, hold immense historical significance. This documentary explores Benedict’s global legacy, tracing his devotion across Europe and South America, while shedding light on how his story shaped religious and racial perception

2025-26 Artistic Research Fellow

Il libro d’ore – The Book of Hours

2025-26 Artistic Research Fellow

Wayward Folly

Using a custom animation application called Knitoscope, this experimental film transforms lines, florals, interiors, and landscapes—sampled from historical prints and manuscripts—into atmospheres exploring portrayals of mania and melancholia in the early modern period.

2025-26 Artistic Research Fellow

Brother Widow: A Novel

Brother Widow is a historical fiction novel.

Colonial Jamaica, 1760. After her brother’s widow is falsely arrested for witchcraft, a reluctant Jamaican woman risks everything to defend her—only to realize that she, too, is on trial. Brother Widow is a novel about the price of independence in a world that demands obedience.

2025-26 Artistic Research Fellow

Writing Trans Morality

I’ll research the medieval form of morality plays, including those held by the Folger, as preparation for a new text-based performance work on the notion of trans experience and morality. This will seek to unfold the existential and linguistic intricacies of the topic, besides the moral panic of gender critical thought. This research will thereby explore how philosophical questions about trans subjecthood meet the language of morality and its historicity, driven by these plays’ formal, thematic, and dramaturgical aspects

2025-26 Artistic Research Fellow

Textiles in Motion: Reimagining Storytelling through Cloth and Cinema

My project explores the intersection of cinema and textiles—looking at how cloth has historically shaped narrative and how its tactile qualities can be translated into animation. I’ll be working with the Folger’s collections to research early modern storytelling and develop a series of woven works, an animated film, and a paper on the cultural role of textiles as a narrative medium.

2025-26 Artistic Research Fellow

Henry VII

Henry VII is a play about the reign of King Henry the Seventh written in the style of Shakespeare’s history plays. In 1485, Henry the Seventh ascended to the throne of England and was tasked with saving the soul of his nation by ending the War of the Roses, a conflict that embroiled the country in civil strife for years. Through Henry’s struggles, audiences will ponder the current political division in the United States and ponder “how do we create an America where we are all truly free?

2025-26 Artistic Research Fellow

HISTORICAL MAROONAGE: Decolonizing space, memory, and heritage

Historical Maroonage addresses the silencing of the Black experience in the Dominican Republic, where Eurocentrism and racism plague spaces of memory and the historical narratives that inform them. Through a publicly engaged approach the project seeks to ensure that the voices of marginalized communities are heard and that their history is incorporated into the narrative fabric of the country and the region. This digital and public humanities project aims to amplify AfrohistoriaRD’s liberatory practice, which disrupts dominant narratives, investigates silenced histories, encourages critical thinking, and fosters imagination by creating new ways to examine our past.

2025-26 Artistic Research Fellow

Margaret Hoby’s Still Room, A Novel

A literary historical fiction novel reimagining Lady Margaret Hoby’s diaries as a narrative told through the lens of rural, domestic and healing activities. Margaret Hoby is a woman controlled through marriage. Her identity, autonomy and resistance is expressed through her control of the domestic interior. With two dead husbands behind her, and no sign of an heir, Margaret finds herself returning to the still room and her herbs and medicines as she navigates the disappointment of her third union.

2025-26 Artistic Research Fellow

More Weight, or, I Saw Goody Proctor at the Gift Shop: A new play

The infamous court proceedings and subsequent executions of 1692-1623 in Salem, Massachusetts—colloquially known as the Salem Witch Trials—have long captured the public imagination in the United States and beyond. The oft sensationalized and frequently misunderstood events have inspired a significant canon of literary and dramatic works, not to mention a tourism industry that, for better or worse, buoys modern-day Salem’s economy. In a sea of books, plays, museums, scare attractions, kitschy waxworks, and “haunted Salem” tours, it is easy to lose sight of the stories of the twenty-five people who died—either by disease or execution—out of the over two hundred accused during a series of trials that tore a community apart and exposed many of the ugly prejudices that undergirded the American colonial project.

Set shortly after the location of the Witch Trials’ execution site was positively identified in 2016, More Weight… is a new play that tells the story of contemporary citizens in Salem who must navigate the practical and ethical challenges of making a living in a place famous for a heinous miscarriage of justice, all while the ghosts of the wrongfully executed women look on, perhaps pulling the strings of fate that dictate the lives of the twenty-first century inhabitants attempting to capitalize on their story.

Broadway: King Lear, Becker in August Wilson’s Jitney (Tony nomination), Carousel, A Time To Kill, Cyrano de Bergerac, Julius Caesar. International: Othello, Henry IV, Royal Shakespeare Company; The Merchant of Venice, Royal Lyceum Theater. Off-Broadway: Endgame at Irish Rep (Obie Award); The Merchant of Venice at Theater For A New Audience; Hamlet (Obie and AUDELCO Awards), Julius Caesar, King Lear at Public Theater; The Iceman Cometh at BAM (Obie and Drama Desk Awards); Tamburlaine (Obie, Drama Desk and AUDELCO Awards), Macbeth (title role), Othello (Obie Award, Lucille Lortel Award, Joe A. Callaway Award), A Doll’s House, The Father, Oroonoko at TFANA; Satchmo At The Waldorf (Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, NAACP Awards) at the Westside Theater; The Forest at Classic Stage Company; The Emperor Jones at Irish Rep (Joe A. Callaway Award and Lucille Lortel, Drama League and Drama Desk nominations); Hedda Gabler at New York Theatre Workshop.

2025-26 Artistic Research Fellow

Promptbooks for Queer Play

Exploring the form of theatrical promptbooks as an alternative to traditional film scripts, the project Promptbooks for Queer Play explores the fluidity of gender and identity in theater and its relationship to contemporary queer communities. Centering on shifting identities found within Shakespeare’s plays, Promptbooks for Queer Play will draw from the promptbooks, theatrical design, costumes, and props holdings at the Folger Library to create new hand-made artist promptbooks.

2025-26 Artistic Research Fellow

From Seed to Resurgence: Xinatchli’s Creative Role in Coahuiltecan Retribalization

From Seed to Resurgence is a multidisciplinary project that will result in a new play integrating songs and historical narratives sourced from the Folger Institute collections. This work contributes to scholarly efforts aimed at reclaiming the cultural heritage of the Coahuiltecan people, Indigenous to Northern Mexico and South Texas, whose history and language have been extensively erased by colonization. Inspired by the Nahuatl word Xinatchli—symbolizing seed germination—the project seeks to revive and honor the erased cultural narratives of the Nahuatl and Coahuila peoples.

Daniela Varon is a New York-based theater director and acting teacher. She is a long-time member of Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, MA, where she has directed 17 productions to date. With Kristin Linklater and Carol Gilligan, she was co-founder and Associate Director of The Company of Women, which produced Shakespeare plays and outreach programs for women and girls. She was also co-producer, director and moderator of the series Conversations with Shakespeare, which played three seasons at Symphony Space.

2025-26 Artistic Research Fellow

Animist Meets Catholic: Melding of Spirituality in Colonial Philippines

In the late 16th century, a key element of the Spanish conquest of the Philippines was the establishment of Catholic friars in the archipelago. Forbidden to practice their indigenous animist spirituality, people of the Philippines found ways to fuse animism with Catholicism as a creative form of resistance to colonial oppression. Studying the Spanish devotional literature from the 16th and 17th centuries at the Folger Shakespeare Library will deepen my understanding of the tricksterism of Filipino spirituality from that period. These studies will allow me to more fully comprehend how to subvert and reclaim the generational inheritances of these histories through the materiality of my practice.

2025-26 Artistic Research Fellow

Talisman for Uncertain Landscapes

My time at the fellowship will be used to research the exchange of goods, during the Early Modern Period from the Middle East, Asia and Africa into Europe and the “magical” qualities they were perceived to have. As the commerce of objects can influence ideas, I will focus on the exchange of trinkets, amulets, and stories related to notions of protection, magic, and good luck, specifically spanning the time after the Crusades to early European colonization. Once back in my studio my goal is to expand an ongoing series called Talisman for Uncertain Landscapes.

2025-26 Short-term Fellow

Representations of Books and Readers

This book project answers scholarly calls to reexamine the ways that book historians and bibliographers quantify and qualify material that comprises our research by raising questions about what counts as evidence and what constitutes an “archive.” Precepts of premodern critical race theory guide my argument that, despite a sotto voce opposition between books and theater underlying scholarly conceptions of the period, historical evidence of a wonderful variety of books and readers may be located in early modern English printed drama. This book ultimately encourages historians of reading to reimagine what scholars may identify as historical evidence and practices of reading, which often comprise examinations of typography, marginalia, book lists, and complex provenance records.

2025-26 Short-term Fellow

Caribbean Shakespeares

This project offers an in-depth exploration of all things Shakespeare in the Caribbean, examining how his works have been interpreted, adapted, and performed throughout the region. It highlights the unique cultural, historical, and linguistic influences that shape Caribbean responses to Shakespearean drama. From stage productions to literary reinterpretations, the project reveals how Shakespeare’s legacy continues to resonate in diverse Caribbean contexts. Through this lens, it also considers issues of colonialism, identity, and cultural hybridity.

2025-26 Short-term Fellow

Muteness and Mute Characters from Antiquity to the Age of Shakespeare

My project explores how conventions surrounding mute characters developed from ancient drama up to the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. In doing so, it theorizes a concept of ‘muteness’ which is distinct from more general ideas or instances of silence in Renaissance drama. Muteness, I argue, is a hitherto overlooked aspect of classical dramatic form that playwrights appropriated, imitated, and adapted in early modernity.

2025-26 Short-term Fellow

Rare or Unique Poems in Manuscript, 1500 – 1660 (RUP)

My Folger fellowship supports work on Rare or Unique Poems in Manuscript, 1500–1660 (RUP), a project recovering early modern verse that survives in only a few manuscript copies. I’ll focus on Folger materials—completing and encoding transcriptions for public access. The goal is to shed light on overlooked poetry and broaden our view of literary culture beyond the printed canon.

2025-26 Short-term Fellow

Wounded Wombs and Empty Cradles: Miscarriage and Pregnancy Loss in Early Modern England c.1600-1780

This monograph length project examines medical publications, manuscript recipe books, and personal correspondence to understand the experiences of miscarriage and stillbirth in early modern England, c. 1600-1780. It focuses on three key areas: Firstly, understanding reproductive failure, where it asks how miscarriage represented reproductive failure and therefore was considered a form of infertility. Secondly, experiences of treating the miscarrying body where the project explores the disparities between medical theory and lived experiences and illuminates the ways in which reproductive failures stimulated the creation of a gendered body of knowledge about gestation and birth. Finally, the project will thicken our understanding of responses to loss by considering how travel, manual work, and the weather generated self-recrimination.

2025-26 Short-term Fellow

Theatrical Mobility in the Ephemeral City: Jesuit Festival in the Viceroyalty of Peru

2025-26 Short-term Fellow

Legal Knowledge in Late Medieval and Early Modern Commonplace Books

My research project seeks to assess the depth and scope of legal knowledge in early modern England by using one of the manuscript types in the Folger collection: commonplace books. These miscellaneous manuscripts – or notebooks, essentially – contain all sorts of memoranda about everyday life in early modern England. Often kept by landowning individuals and families, they typically contain legal materials, though these have hitherto been of little interest to modern scholars. My fellowship at the Folger will be spent working through the papers of early modern English families for such evidence of their legal note-taking.

2025-26 Short-term Fellow

Iroquois Architecture and the Experience of Captivity in Northeast America, 1650 – 1775

2025-26 Short-term Fellow

The English Malady Abroad: Emotions and Translations of Melancholy in Continental Europe in the Long 18th Century (1660-1800)

My project aims to analyze the circulation, reception, and translation of concepts related to melancholy between Britain, France, Spain, and Italy in the long 18th century. I’m particularly interested in ‘untranslatable’ concepts and what they can tell us about the communicability of experience.

2025-26 Short-term Fellow

Inventing the Commons: Law, Literature, and Political Imagination in the Early Modern Iberian World

2025-26 Short-term Fellow

Changes in the Sea: Eighteenth-Century New England Innovations in Fisheries Sustainability

Environmental histories of New England follow a narrative that laments the loss of pristine nature because of commercial exploitation. My dissertation shifts the focus from the harmful effects of merchant capitalism to earlier, pre-industrial challenges that forced fishers and fish merchants to develop strategies to make commercial fishing more sustainable. This work explores these strategies and their implementations in eighteenth-century commercial fisheries. Despite their lack of success, these innovations trouble the declensionism by showing that early Americans were invested in protecting the fisheries and the sea.

2025-26 Short-term Fellow

Threadwork: The Lost Masterpiece of Tintoretto’s Daughters

My research focuses on early modern Italian women’s labor networks, specifically through silk, lace, and embroidery production. At the Folger, I will be preparing an article on the embroidery work of Tintoretto’s daughters.

2025-26 Short-term Fellow

Women’s Tricks: Gender, Power, and Dissimulation in Early Modern England

My book-in-progress examines a neglected overlap between prescriptive literature for women and early modern English stage plays: namely, a shared emphasis on feminine dissembling. It argues that plays and instructional texts theorize women’s deceit in social terms, revealing its origins in conditions of structural inequality and situational risk.

2025-26 Short-term Fellow

Critical edition of A Trewe Reporte of the Life and Marterdome of Mrs Margarete Clitherowe

2025-26 Short-term Fellow

People on the Move in Early Modern England

People on the Move in Early Modern England traces everyday, quotidian journeys made by early modern people – men and women, rich and poor – that took them beyond the boundary of parish. The project stretches the geography of community and its features, arguing that early modern people’s lives were not self-contained within the places they lived. The project therefore expands our understanding of the spatial horizons of early modern people.

2025-26 Short-term Fellow

Rehearsing Bondage: Performing Racial Slavery on the English Stage (1550 – 1670)

2025-26 Short-term Fellow

“Diligent Search” into the Folger’s Copy 6 of John Gerard’s Herball (1597)

Thomasin Tunstall (fl. 1632) has a poor reputation in the history of botany. In the early twentieth century she was scolded in print for having opened to London markets orchids growing in England’s north. She told John Parkinson where the wildflowers grew; he informed readers of /Paradisi in Sole/ (1629); and then there were none. The Folger owns a rare book that powerfully reframes this misogynous likely story: copy 6 of STC 11750, John Gerard’s /Herball/ (1597), a 1400+ page encyclopedia that Tunstall owned and used in the early seventeenth century.

2025-26 Short-term Fellow

Towards Indigenous Shakespeares

This project used methods from Critical Indigenous Studies to read the representations of land, relationally, and gender in early modern travel literature and drama. The project, moreover, will look at Indigenous authors from Turtle Island who are writing back to Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

2025-26 Short-term Fellow

Paper Skin: Printing Blackness and Materializing Race in the Early Modern Dutch Atlantic

2025-26 Short-term Fellow

Providential Bodies: Health and Environment in Early Modern English Medicine

My book project, tentatively titled Providential Bodies: Health and Environment in Early Modern English Medicine, investigates the long history of ‘reading’ English bodies in relationship to their environment, exploring how this practice was transformed in confessionalized, post-Reformation England, and how these transformations influenced the emergence of a localized, rather than universal, theory of environmental medicine.

This study, now in its early research stages, has the potential to draw together several important but, until now, disconnected strains of research within early modern English history: on the effects of the Reformation on theories of bodily difference; on the co-emergence of providentialism and ethnonationalism within post-Reformation English society; on enclosure, land rights, and the health effects of migration into cities; on colonial agricultural ventures, which theorized English bodies’ susceptibility to varying climates; and on the birth of demography and medical experimentation in the context of the Royal Society. The emergence of a notion that the body’s relationship to its environment was particular and indicative of individual differences in health, I suggest, dramatically altered the trajectory of early modern English medicine.

From that singular insight came a host of developments that Providential Bodies seeks to contextualize as part of a broader pattern of thought and belief, one that stretches from the diagnostic practices of later medieval physicians to the medical experiments of the Royal Society, traversing the medieval-early modern divide that too often bifurcates histories of English medicine and science.

2025-26 Short-term Fellow

Murder and the Mundane: Capital Punishment and the Architecture of Black Criminality

My dissertation project examines mens rea and racial slavery as two trans-Atlantic discourses that converged in early New England criminal courts, guided juror assessments of criminal culpability, and was one major factor in making New England the region with highest rates of enslaved executions per capita in British North America between 1675 and 1775.

2025-26 Short-term Fellow

The Reformation and Time: Clocks, Calendars, Cultures in Early Modern England

My dissertation explores how the Reformation transformed how time was organized in 16th and 17th century England. As many existing temporal structures vanished in the wake of religious reform, Protestants constructed a new understanding and practice of sacred time. This led to the explosion of irregular, heterogeneous, and overlapping temporalities that restructured the experience of time in everyday life. My research aims to show that rather than producing a flattened, secularized, abstracted, or homogenized approach to time, the Reformation era generated a new economy of sacred time all its own.

2025-26 Short-term Fellow

“We Write for Those Who Understand Our Language”: The Politics of Modern Literary Taste in Postcolonial Upper Andes (1821-1912)

My project reconstructs the development of modern literary criticism in the Upper Andes from 1821 to 1912, focusing on the origins, circulation, and political roles of the notion of taste and its relationship with republicanism. Republicanism was a tradition that provided a broad vocabulary for framing political communities around the idea of the general interest and formed the foundation of nineteenth-century political culture in Latin America, encompassing diverse ideologies. I analyze not only how Andean intellectuals engaged with literary criticism but also the political implications of their interpretations of taste—understood broadly as the social dispositions to create and evaluate literary works. While Ecuador serves as my starting point, I adopt a regional methodology, considering the Upper Andes—including present-day Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru—a compelling case due to its intellectual networks, sustained exchanges, and shared post-independence struggles to integrate diverse indigenous communities, the largest in the southern hemisphere, into republican frameworks.

2025-26 Short-term Fellow

‘Ravish’d with Sacred Extasies’: Performing Female Piety in Early Eighteenth-Century English Devotional Songs

My project explores women’s domestic devotional music-making in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England. I examine print and manuscript sources of Protestant devotional music, including musical settings of psalms, hymns, and other religious poetry, in order to understand how upper- and middling-class women used this repertoire in the context of music-making at home. In analyzing these sources, I attend to the ways in which women represented their own piety within their musical materials. Through my analysis of these sources of devotional music, I show how women’s domestic devotional performances shaped ideals of female piety in England at the start of a new century.

2025-26 Short-term Fellow

The Currency of Consent: Meaning in Early Modern Rituals of Coin Exchange

This project will produce an ethnography of consent through early modern coin-exchange rituals. I will focus on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, where the giving and receiving of a coin indicated the striking of a deal. Coins had meaning beyond their exchange value (as advance payments); they also possessed a use value (as tokens of consent). This ritual had a number of vernacular names: earnest money, arles, fastening penny, hiring penny, and God’s penny.

2025-26 Short-term Fellow

Black Caesar: The Many Lives, Deaths and Myths of an Enslaved Pirate Lost to History

My project attempts to uncover the story of a mysterious early-modern pirate known as Black Caesar. I am also interested in how our fascination with this figure has led to the spreading and consumption of misinformation.

2025-26 Short-term Fellow

Editing Henry VI, Part 2 in Chinese

A project involving the reception study, translation study and editoral study of Shakespeare in China.