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?

HISTORICAL MAROONAGE: Decolonizing space, memory, and heritage
2026-27 Folger Institute Artistic Research Fellow

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.

John Douglas Thompson is an English-American actor. He is a Tony Award nominee and the recipient of two Drama Desk Awards, three Obie Awards, an Outer Critics Circle Award, and a Lucille Lortel Award.

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

Margaret Hannay Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender-Folger Institute 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

ASECS-Folger Institute 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

Omohundro Institute-Folger Institute 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

The Justice of Malicious Intent: Capital Punishment and The Architecture of Black Criminality

My dissertation examines the procedural mechanisms employed in colonial New England capital trials in an effort to uncover the causes that generated racial disparities in legal outcomes. Specifically, I focus on the development of mens rea (criminal culpability) as both a legal framework in the courtroom and a lexicon employed by colonial actors in day-to-day conversations and in popular literature, both in New England and the wider British Atlantic, which I argue led to the construction of Black criminality in the colonial imagination. In so doing, my project devotes long overdue attention to the lives of enslaved actors ensnared by the law in early New England, complicating the presumptive status of guilt and innocence under the often dire conditions created by human bondage.

2025-26 Short-term Fellow

NACBS-Folger Institute 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.

The Grammar of the Other: Translation and the (Un)Making of Gender, Sexual, and Racial Difference
2026-27 Folger Institute Long-term Fellow

Abdulhamit Arvas is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. His research includes early modern sexuality, gender, race, cross-cultural encounters, and global Shakespeare. His first book, Boys Abducted: The Homoerotics of Empire and Race in Early Modernity (Duke UP, 2025), received Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Book Prize for the Best Book in Renaissance Studies, by RSA, and the First Book Award by SAA. He co-edited the tenth anniversary issue of postmedieval, titled Critical Confessions Now (2020). He is currently at work writing a new introduction for a new edition of Othello by Oxford University Press, while working on his second monograph, The Grammar of the Other: Translation and the (Un)Making of Gender, Sexual, and Racial Difference, which explores how the history of sexuality in the West is inseparable from histories of translation and transnational contact.

The History and Practice of Playful Media
2026-27 Folger Institute Long-term Public Humanities Fellow

Emily Friedman is Jean Wickstrom Professor of English at Auburn University. A trained eighteenth-centuryist, she applies her experience in book history, digital humanities, performance studies, and the history of the early novel to new media forms, and has become the most-visible scholar of Actual Play, the recording of roleplaying games for public dissemination. Her public writing on tabletop roleplaying games and Actual Play has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books and Polygon, alongside scholarly work in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies alongside other edited collections, and has been featured in The Washington Post, CNBC, and Dropout, among others. Her next book, The Actual History of Actual Play, is under contract with MIT University Press. Her research interests include the representation of pre-1800 history in games, the feminist history of roleplaying, documented play, friendship, and microcelebrity.

Music Under the Mask: Carnival and Theatrical Sound in Early Modern Europe
2026-27 Folger Institute Long-term Fellow

Early Modern Fencing: A Global History
2026-27 Folger Institute Long-term Fellow

Diego Javier Luis is the Rohrbaugh Family Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University. He specializes in the intersections of colonial Latin America and the Pacific World, and he is the author of The First Asians in the Americas: A Transpacific History. At the Folger, he is developing a new project, Early Modern Fencing: A Global History, in which he traces the co-creation of fencing ideas and practice in European colonial borderlands, from the Mediterranean to the Americas and Southeast Asia, from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. His goal is to demonstrate how colonial subjects participated in the discourse and aesthetics of fencing to advance their economic, social, and political interests. As a fencer, he is also keen to recreate historical movement and, in so doing, to use embodied knowledge to read archival documents against the grain.

Tender Age: Early Modern Childhood and the Engendering of Difference
2026-27 Folger Institute Long-term Fellow

Harry R. McCarthy is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern California. His work is interested in the body and the various ways in which it is marked, categorized, and exhibited, particularly in performance, and has to date had a particular emphasis on child actors (the subject of his first two books). He is now at work on a new book project, Tender Age: Early Modern Childhood and the Engendering of Difference, which interrogates how early modern children were subject to structures of racialized and gendered formation and how this gendered racial thinking infiltrates representations of children in the literature, drama, and culture of the period. Harry has previously held academic posts at the Universities of Exeter and Cambridge, and in 2021 was the first British scholar to be awarded the Shakespeare Association of America’s J. Leeds Barroll Dissertation Prize.

Shakespeare’s Enemies
2026-27 Folger Chair in Shakespeare Studies

Paul Menzer is Professor and Executive Director of Shakespeare and Performance at Mary Baldwin University. He is the author and editor of numerous books, including The Hamlets: Cues, Q’s, and Remembered Texts, Anecdotal Shakespeare, Shakespeare in the Theatre: The American Shakespeare Center, Shakespeare without Print, The Brief Life of William Shakespeare, and The Complete Life of William Shakespeare, as well as editions of Romeo and Juliet and Doctor Faustus. A past President of the Marlowe Society of America and member of the editorial board of Shakespeare Quarterly, Menzer’s work explores how Shakespeare has been performed, remembered, adapted, and mythologized across time. He is also a practicing playwright whose works have appeared at the Blackfriars Playhouse and elsewhere. His current project is Shakespeare’s Enemies, which examines the writers, critics, reformers, and iconoclasts who opposed Shakespeare across the last four centuries.

The Body Perfect: the Aesthetic of Ableism and Race in the Early Modern Francosphere
2026-27 Folger Institute Long-term Fellow

Jennifer Row is an associate professor at the University of Minnesota, where she researches and teaches in critical disability studies, queer theory, early modern theater and dance, and affect theory. Queer Velocities: Time, Sex and Biopower on the Early Modern Stage (Northwestern UP 2022), examines the affects of speeds and slownesses of queer erotics onstage in relation to seventeenth century theater’s power to govern the time of life. Her second monograph in progress, The Body Perfect: the Aesthetics of Ableism and Race in the Early Francophone World argues that aesthetic practices (from dance manuals to architecture to fairy tales) shaped the differences between valuable and disposable bodies, and explores how these disciplining forces reverberated across race, gender and sexuality in the early modern French and Francophone world.

This research was supported by McKnight Land-Grant Professorship and the Solmsen Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

The Color of Melancholy: On Being and Feeling Black in Early Modern Literature
2026-27 Folger Institute Long-term Fellow

The Moor’s Voice: A Moroccan Journalist Reads English Colonial Archives
2026-27 Folger Institute Artistic Research Fellow

My name is Khalid Bencherif, and I am an investigative journalist from Morocco, based in Berlin in Germany, specializing in covering environmental, and political issues in North Africa. I got the 2022 Michael Elliott Award for Excellence in African Storytelling, given by the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ).

My Artistic Research Fellowship project is “The Moor’s Voice: A Moroccan Journalist Reads English Colonial Archives.” This project is a collection of creative nonfiction essays that will respond to Folger holdings on Anglo-Moroccan encounters in the 17th century.

Speaking More Than Is Set Down: Historic Structures in Clowning
2026-27 Folger Institute Artistic Research Fellow

Chase Brantley is an award-winning clown, graduate of École Philippe Gaulier, and founder of Moonlight Theater Company (est. 2018) base in Athens, GA. He has directing a collaborated on more than 25 productions are the US, UK, and Europe, including work as a clown coach ton shows that were featured in The New York Times recommendations. His current show Don Toberman: Ping-Pong Champ has won over 8 awards and received five-star reviews during his sold-out run at the 2025 Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

At the Folger Library, Brantley will be researching how historical English clowns designed and built the structures around their performance, including games, spatial arrangements, costumes, sound effects, and audience permission systems. Retreating the achieves as a rehearsal partner, he hopes to challenge and expand his contemporary clown practice by exploring primary clown courses like Robert Armin’s Quips Vpon Questions and the library’s vast collection of anti-clowning literature.

Unidentified Tropical Event: Weather Magic, Nature Control and Climate Forcing in the Little Ice Age
2026-27 Folger Institute Artistic Research Fellow

Mica Cabildo is a Filipina visual artist and graphic designer based in Metro Manila, Philippines. Since 2014, she has explored disaster, tropicality, and adaptation with scientists and indigenous communities through residencies, fieldwork, and ethnographic immersion. Her practice includes site-specific installations, alternative photography, printmaking, audio production, AR, VR, and web-based storytelling. Her current project, Unidentified Tropical Event, investigates early modern attempts to externalize, manipulate, and comprehend volatile weather during the volcanically driven Little Ice Age in Britain and Europe through a review of witchcraft trials, alchemical texts, and cosmogonic theories in the collections of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Mica was a fellow for design at Akademie Schloss Solitude, an international resident artist at Gasworks London, and a grantee of the Prince Claus Fund and Goethe-Institut’s Cultural and Artistic Responses to Environmental Change program.

All in Jest: a screenplay exploring gender non-conformity in 15th-century England
2026-27 Folger Institute Artistic Research Fellow

Lee Cotman (they/them) makes art for and about working-class people.

A museum educator-turned-screenwriter, they write fictional screenplays about people whose names have been lost to time. They are a Master’s student and Graduate Diversity Fellow at Empire State University, studying queer and trans history and its representations in medieval cinema. Lee’s research focuses on the lived experiences of marginalized people during the medieval/early modern transitional period. Their current project (which they promise will have a happy ending) is a feature-length screenplay following a transmasculine acrobat in 15th-century England.

Lee is also a founding member of the project team for Always Here: a Queer+Trans Global Medieval Sourcebook (led by Professor Bridget Whearty, Binghamton University), and received a 2025 juried residency with the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. In their off-hours, they tend a native garden, ride bikes with their kid, and clown around at Circus Culture.

Those Indians are Judaical! …and Other Concerns
2026-27 Folger Institute Artistic Research Fellow

Lu Coy is an LA-based multimedia artist, musician, and educator who reinvigorates the histories of their Indigenous, Mexican, and Jewish heritage. They create performances that draw on their training as a multi-instrumentalist—blending vocals, woodwinds, and electronics into immersive theatrical worlds. Guided by queer approaches to storytelling, Coy reorients who stands at the center, giving attention to figures deemed “failures” or “monsters” by dominant histories.

Their new multimedia project Those Indians are Judaical! …and Other Concerns presents a satirical interrogation of the Jewish Indian Theory—the fallacious claim that Native Americans descended from the lost tribes of Israel, which circulated Europe in the 17th Century. It explores the complexities and contradictions at the intersections of Jewish and Native identities, while confronting how narratives of otherness become weaponized and redeployed across time in service of exclusion, displacement, and political power.

Mika Eubanks (Costume Design) Folger Theatre: debut. Classical Theater of Harlem: Seize The King; Lincoln Center Theater: Flex; The Vineyard Theatre: Lessons in Survival: 1971. Regional: Repertory Theatre of St. Louis: Feeding Beatrice; Baltimore Center Stage/Long Wharf Theatre: Fires In The Mirror; Old Globe: The XIXth; St. Louis Shakespeare Festival: King Lear starring André De Shields; Asolo Repertory Theater: Grand Horizons; Yale Repertory Theatre/CTH: Twelfth Night, for which she received the Connecticut Critic Circle Award for outstanding costume design. Film: Candace. Television: Initiative 29 (Hulu). Currently located in New York, but hailing from Maryland, Mika received her MFA in Costume Design at Yale School of Drama and holds a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art. In 2022, she served as the costume assistant on the Tony Award-winning Best Musical A Strange Loop. mikaeubanks.com

How I Came to Know the Roses: A Taxonomy in Verse
2026-27 Folger Institute Artistic Research Fellow

RK Fauth is a poet with an interest in the relationship between queerness and the history of botanical taxonomy. Her research at the Folger considers how the Enlightenment-era foundations of flower sexuality–and the slippery metaphors that beget scientific fact–shaped modern ideas of gender, nature, and desire. RK is working on a found poetry project that deconstructs the language of botanical reproduction in the Linnaean and pre-Linnaean traditions (1500-1753), looking at the relational poetics of herbals, natural histories, and florilegium. Through poetry, her goal is to recover and rearrange the associative charge that knits botany’s rigid taxonomies together, making new poems that push “unnaturalness” toward kinship and belonging.

RK has held artist residencies at Art Omi, Djerassi, and the Oak Spring Garden Foundation. She’s received scholarships from the The Fulbright Program, The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Georgetown’s Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice.

The Witchcraft Classifier That Refuses to Classify
2026-27 Folger Institute Artistic Research Fellow

Parham Ghalamdar is an Iranian-born, Manchester-based multidisciplinary artist working across painting, film, writing, and digital image systems. His practice looks at how images shape belief, memory, and political perception, often bringing historical material into contact with machine vision and speculative media. At the Folger Shakespeare Library, he will develop The Witchcraft Classifier That Refuses to Classify, a research-led video essay and AI experiment on early modern witchcraft imagery as a visual system of accusation. Using a carefully curated set of demonology prints, trial illustrations, and proof diagrams, he will train a generative model not to identify witches, but to expose how classification produces guilt in advance. The project asks how images make suspicion look like evidence, and how that logic returns in contemporary automated vision systems. Ghalamdar’s work turns technical tools into critical methods for reading archives, power, resistance and refusal.

The World Is Her Oyster: Fabricated Travelogues and Objects of Afro-Diasporic Women in the Early Modern Period
2026-27 Folger Institute Artistic Research Fellow

My practice examines the power, value, and lived realities of Afro-Diasporic women.Through installation art, film, community activations, and sculpture I challenge the context that we view ourselves and each other in. Across these forms, I interrogate how histories are recorded, distorted, or erased—particularly within archives shaped by colonial logics. Central to my practice is a visual and material application of Saidiya Hartman’s theory of critical fabulation. I fabricate speculative artifacts that stand in for lives relegated to footnotes or absences in the historical record. These works propose plausible material evidence where documentation is missing. Through these “false” objects, I explore how suppressed histories might take provisional form.

The People’s Will: The Story of the Terrific and Fatal Riot
2026-27 Folger Institute Artistic Research Fellow

Tracie Holder is a filmmaker and producer who teaches at the New York Film Academy and Hunter College. She mentors emerging filmmakers, leads workshops and serves on juries at international pitching and training sessions. Holder is the co-director/producer/writer of Joe Papp in Five Acts (a co-production with PBS/American Masters). Producing credits include Grit, Small Town Universe and Give It a Shot. Holder was a longtime consultant to Women Make Movies and served as the Development & Funding Strategist for Abby Disney’s Fork Films. She is a former board member of NY Women in Film and grant panelist for national and local funders. Holder is currently directing The People’s Will, an NEH-funded feature documentary about two rival productions of Macbeth in New York City in 1849 that led to a riot in which twenty-two people were killed and marked the first time in U.S. history in which American troops fired on American citizens.

Atin Anting-Anting: Amulets from the Ancient Mariner
2026-27 Folger Institute Artistic Research Fellow

KhoKhoi (mary alinney villacastin) is a movement-based artist and a plant, body & cultural worker.

Proudly descended from pearl divers & fisherfolk of Bantayan island, KhoKhoi is based between the native lands stewarded by the Munsee Lenape, Mohican, Wappinger & Schaghticoke (New York City) & the Visayan Sea, Philippines. KK’s cultural research is informed by her BA in Anthropology from Barnard College of Columbia University, and MA in Media Studies from The New School of Public Engagement. Thinking critically about sensual embodiment amidst shifting techno-ecologies, her creative & community work bridges local, healing lineages (as founder of Kalami Spirit Arts) and global, transoceanic webs of relations (as co-founder of Bàbà Bisaya). For her Folger project, “Ubos sa Dagat: The Undersea,” KK is looking at archival, colonial texts describing the premodern seascapes of present day Philippines, in order to speculate on parallel, submerged indigenous histories.

Grafting the Archive: Labor, Tools, and the Reparative Book
2026-27 Folger Institute Artistic Research Fellow

Bo Kim is an artist-researcher and educator based in Amherst, MA. Born in Busan, South Korea, she works across drawing, painting, book arts, installation, and archival research to explore cultural memory, migration, ecological relationships, and material transformation. Her interdisciplinary practice examines how archives, museums, and preservation practices shape histories, identities, and knowledge through artistic research, material inquiry, and ecological thinking. Kim is developing Grafting the Archive: Labor, Tools, and the Reparative Book. Drawing from early modern texts, rare books, Korean Ho-mi agricultural traditions, and SCOBY–mulberry paper membranes, she creates hybrid books that function as artworks, research documents, and pedagogical tools. Through grafting, layering, and binding, the project reimagines archives as relational, more-than-human systems that foster care, ecological awareness, and cross-cultural connection.

Possible Wombs
2026-27 Folger Institute Artistic Research Fellow

Madyha Leghari is a visual artist whose practice explores the instability of language and the body. At the Folger, she will investigate how early modern visualizations of the womb shaped ideas of life, personhood, and maternal agency. Drawing on historical anatomical diagrams, she will create drawings and ceramic sculptures that reimagine anatomy through speculative organs and wombs that are multispecies, symbiotic, autonomous, or metaphorical. She is also appropriating scientific labeling systems as frameworks for poetic inscription. The project places historical research in dialogue with contemporary debates around reproductive futures, bodily autonomy, and the politics of fetal and maternal life. Leghari has been the recipient of the Fulbright Scholarship, Nicholson Studio Residency, VisArts Bresler Residency, Wherewithal Research Grant, Hamiltonian Artists Fellowship, Mansion Artist Residency, Delta Research Placement at Flat Time House, and Siena Art Institute Artist Residency.

All We Have is Means: Weaving ‘Amerikani’ into the Fabric of Mijikenda Subversion
2026-27 Folger Institute Fellow

Emily Lyon (Co-Adaptor) is a director, dramaturg, and artistic director that carves out the humor and authenticity in new and classic texts. She co-created, leads, and curates Expand the Canon––a call to action to include a wide range of historic women and gender-expansive writers in the canon of classics––as Artistic Director. As a freelance director, Lyon has directed nine world premieres, including Diana Ly’s Sex and the Abbey (The Brick), and has worked with the Folger Theatre, Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, Geva Theatre, The Old Globe, LaMaMa, Yale Rep, the Royal Shakespeare Company, University of Michigan, and others. As a dramaturg, she’s worked with writers on shaping over 25 new plays, including the world premiere of Kate Hamill’s Sense & Sensibility, and editing classical texts, including the Expand the Canon plays and The Tempest for Shakespeare in the Park. Find out more at EmilyALyon.com, and ExpandTheCanon.com.

Khazic Songs
2026-27 Folger Institute Artistic Research Fellow

Creative Troubadourism: Reimagining Early Modern English Ballads through East African Folk Traditions
2026-27 Folger Institute Artistic Research Fellow

Muco is a singer, songwriter and composer of British-Burundian heritage whose music is inspired by a love of language and storytelling. Through his reworkings of medieval folk songs in Middle and Old English, Muco has cultivated a passionate audience online with his unique interpretations. In these performances, he draws on the concept of ‘creative troubadourism,’ using his voice and autoharp, as well as the inanga (an East African zither), to reimagine historic folk music and poetry. His work not only revives these ancient pieces for modern audiences but also expands ideas of historical musical performance. He seeks not to recreate but to make the music understood, appropriate to a new time.

The Unnatural Deed: Narrative Oil Paintings on the Allegories of Environmental Collapse
2026-27 Folger Institute Artistic Research Fellow

This project investigates Shakespeare’s Macbeth as an ecological text by translating scenes from the play into a series of large scale oil paintings. I am interested in depicting the moments in which natural law is unnaturally disrupted in Macbeth: his horses devouring one another, the killing of a falcon by a mousing-owl, the disappearance of the sun, Birnam woods rising against him. Through researching and drawing compositional inspiration from the Folger’s collections of Romantic-era artworks, I make connections between art historical tropes and Macbeth’s themes of ambition to serve as an allegory for the current environmental threats Texas faces today via AI data center expansion and water loss.

Loom
2026-27 Folger Institute Artistic Research Fellow

Charlie Oh’s plays have been developed at Manhattan Theatre Club, South Coast Rep, The Lark, Second Stage, The Goodman, among others. His plays include “LONG” (Kennedy Center’s Paula Vogel Award in playwriting, Mark Twain Prize, Relentless Award Honors), “COLEMAN ’72 (Paul Stephen Lim Playwriting Award, Los Angeles Drama Circle Award nominee), “WHITE MONKEY” (Goodman New Stages, Future Labs), and “THE DISRUPTORS.” Charlie is a member, past fellow, or alumni of Ensemble Studio Theater’s Youngblood, Ars Nova Play Group, Page 73’s Writers Group, The Lark, The Playwrights Center Core Writer Program, among others. He currently holds commissions from Manhattan Theater Club and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, South Coast Rep, and is developing projects for television with Amazon Studios and Universal Studios. A recent graduate of The Juilliard School’s Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program.

His work at the Folger will be for his new play LOOM, a history of the Luddite rebellions.

HISTORICAL MAROONAGE: Decolonizing space, memory, and heritage
2026-27 Folger Institute Artistic Research Fellow

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.

Indian Pickle: V.a.680
2026-27 Folger Institute Artistic Research Fellow

Jagrut Raval is a visual artist and researcher based in Hamburg, Germany. His work explores gaps between history, mythology, museum collections, and colonial archives, with a particular interest in speculative storytelling. His practice spans installation, photography, lecture performance, drawing, and digital archives.

His research develops a storyworld around Narad, an itinerant polymath, and Soltan Gjin Achmet, whose presence in eighteenth-century Americas and Europe appears through archival traces. Jagrut uses fragments, mistranslations, and missing records as material for visual and narrative works. This forms the basis of his project The Story of Somafal, which began through research and performances at Museum am Rothenbaum (MARKK), Hamburg. His work has been supported by the Hamburg Ministry of Culture and Media. He studied Photography at Savannah College of Art and Design, USA; Expanded Media at Hochschule Darmstadt, Germany; and Interior Architecture at CEPT University, India.

Bess of Bromley
2026-27 Folger Institute Artistic Research Fellow

Craig is a theatre director and the Head of Conservatoire Training at Shakespeare’s Globe. He trained as an actor and worked for companies including The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, The Old Vic, Birmingham Stage Company, Lyric Hammersmith, and the RSC. Craig is the co-founder and director of Shakespeare’s Globe Prison Project.

Craig’s research will lead towards a new play exploring the intertwined histories of animals and child apprentices in early modern England. At the centre of the work is the blood sport and spectacle of bearbaiting, reimagined through the fictional relationship between a bearward’s apprentice, pushed into hard and dangerous labour, and a captive, baited bear. Through their connection, the play looks at how two very different subjected figures might form a bond in a society that profits from their suffering, confinement, and performance. Their story opens up wider questions about cruelty, empathy, and resilience in the seventeenth century and in the world today.

The Weight of a Fig
2026-27 Folger Institute Artistic Research Fellow

I am currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre & Dance at Amherst College, but am based out of NYC working as a performer-writer. I’m spending my fellowship time working on a new piece titled: The Weight of a Fig, a performance project exploring how early modern English texts used South Asian and Middle Eastern objects, such as figs, spices, silks, and jewels, to signify excess, danger, sensuality, and exoticism. I am hoping to create an immersive promenade-theatre piece that reclaims these objects through diasporic memory, cultural critique, and embodied storytelling.

I’m a refugee immigrant from the Middle East whose outside interests include everything from gaming and comics to nature trails and cooking far too much for social occasions.

Fermented Pasts and Futures (working title)
2026-27 Folger Institute Artistic Research Fellow

Julia Skinner is a food historian, writer, visual artist, and entrepreneur as well as a fermentation enthusiast and culinary educator. She has a PhD in Library & Information Science, and focused on Early Modern cookbook history during her time at the University of Iowa Center for the Book. Skinner is a former special collections professional, and is passionate about using food as a bridge between history and the modern world. Her work at the Folger explores how fermentation appears in Early Modern texts, both literally as fermented foods and figuratively as a metaphor. Skinner is the author of multiple books including Our Fermented Lives and Essential Food Preserving, and lives between Atlanta, GA and Cork, Ireland.

Lucent Life Force: Trans World-Building through Storytelling
2026-27 Folger Institute Artistic Research Fellow

Father Country: The African American Culture and Britain
2026-27 Folger Institute Artistic Research Fellow

Michael W. Twitty is an African-American Jewish writer, culinary historian, and educator. He is the author of The Cooking Gene, which won the 2018 James Beard Foundation Book Award for Book of the Year as well as the category for writing. His third book, Kosher Soul, was published in 2022 and was the first book by a Black author awarded the National Jewish Book Award. Twitty has made appearances on Andrew Zimmern’s Bizarre Foods America, Taste the Nation with Padma Laskshmi, Netflix’s High on the Hog and Many Rivers to Cross with Dr. Henry Louis Gates on PBS.

Monstrous and Sacred Bodies: Imagining the East in Early Modern Europe
2026-27 Folger Institute Artistic Research Fellow

Valkyrie Yao is an artist, researcher, educator, and founder of ELSEHERE International Arts Nexus. Working across performance, moving image, installation, and critical writing, her practice examines how bodies, images, rituals, and archival traces carry cultural memory across time, language, and geography. Her research brings performance studies into dialogue with ritual studies, Chinese aesthetic-philosophical thought, Buddhist and Daoist cosmologies, and contemporary media culture. It examines how masked bodies, repeated gestures, threshold actions, devotional forms, and image-based spectatorship produce systems of perception, transmission, and historical interpretation. Her work has been supported by the Folger Institute Artistic Research Fellowship, the LMCC Manhattan Arts Creative Engagement Grant, The Laundromat Project Create Change Fellowship, and international presentations in performance, film, and interdisciplinary arts.

Racial Recursivity: A Methodology for Critical Race Game Studies
2026-27 Folger Institute Fellow

Austin Anderson Ph.D is a Provostial Fellow at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Critical Game Studies Lab. He studies how games are enmeshed with race, gender, identity, and class while also examining the liberatory potentials of gameworlds. His first book project, Racial Recursivity: A Methodology for Critical Race Game Studies, creates a formalist ludic-textual framework for reading videogames as racial-cultural projects by exploring the role of repetition in racial practices and games. At the Folger, he will be working through references to Shakespeare in Bethesda’s videogames and looking at how these references are mediated by racial considerations.

Secret Knowledge in Motion: Volvelles in Early Modern Cryptography Manuals
2026-27 Folger Institute Fellow

Corinne Bayerl (she/ her) is Associate Teaching Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oregon. Her research focuses on early modern cryptography, drama, and anti-theatrical movements across Europe. As a Folger Fellow, she will work on a project tentatively entitled Secret Knowledge in Motion: Volvelles in Early Modern Cryptography Manuals. Building on scholarship from the fields of book history, translation studies, and the history of science and technology, Secret Knowledge in Motion aims to show that volvelles are an important instrument of scientific and cultural imagination in the Early Modern era.

In recent years, Corinne has been a yearlong fellow of American Council of Learned Societies, and has held short term fellowships at the Folger Library and Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel, Germany.

Lost in the Collation Line: John Hughes and English Editorial History
2026-27 Folger Institute Fellow

This project focuses on the life and work of the poet, playwright, and translator John Hughes (1677-1720), with a particular attention to his literary editing. In 1715, Hughes edited The Works of Mr. Edmund Spenser, which was published by Jacob Tonson. There is also evidence to suggest that he was the anonymous editor both of Tonson’s 1714 edition of The Works of Mr. William Shakespear and of Tonson’s 1719 edition of Paradise Lost. Hughes was unusually prolific, but much of his editing was done anonymously. At the Folger, I will study Tonson’s manuscripts, as well as a series of letters by members of Hughes’s family, in order to get a fuller understanding of Hughes’s involvement in Tonson’s publications. More broadly, the project examines the role of anonymity in eighteenth-century editing and the ways in which modern scholarship has, and has not, accounted for the labour of scholars like Hughes.

Florence Beyond Florence: The Strozzi Collection at the Folger Shakespeare Library
2026-27 Folger Institute Fellow

Incapable of their Own Distress: Gender, Representation, and Grief in Early Modern England
2026-27 Folger Institute Fellow

My project studies gender, personal emotion, and collective understanding through the representational practice of grief in early modern English literature. I argue that gendered grief was central to the fracturing of collective understanding in the period, as national traumas undermined extant processes for making personal experiences communally legible. Amidst changing mourning rituals and political instability, gender increasingly determined which griefs could be consoled by translating them outwards to the collective and which remained private and illegible. My fellowship will support research for a chapter on Lady Anne Waller’s “Spiritual Journal” (1646-61). Waller uses blank space in her manuscript in an unusual way: to represent the “unknown mercies” she receives that relieve her grief. I will study these blanks alongside similar typographical features in contemporary books to explore how inexpressibility could represent intense feelings of grief in text beyond linguistic forms.

War in the Time of Anglo-Dutch Empire
2026-27 Folger Institute Fellow

Elizabeth Hines is currently an Ax:son Johnson Institute for Statecraft and Diplomacy postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University. Beginning in fall 2026, she will be an assistant professor in history at the University of South Florida. Her book project explores Anglo-Dutch relations and transimperial ventures in the early modern period. Her research has been supported by organizations including the American Historical Association, the Omohundro Institute, and the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium, and she has held fellowships at institutions including the British Library, the New York Public Library, and the Huntington Library.

Remixing Diaspora: Sudanese Music, Dance, and Cultural Performance as Revolutionary Solidarity – from Colonization to Counterrevolution
2026-27 Folger Institute Fellow

shah noor hussein is a Sudanese writer, public scholar, and visual artist crafting narratives at the nexus diaspora studies and feminist ethnography. shah is a doctoral candidate, Cota-Robles Scholar, and Presidents Fellow in the Departments of Anthropology and Critical Race & Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. shah’s forthcoming manuscript, Remixing Diaspora: Sudanese Music, Dance, and Cultural Performance as Revolutionary Solidarity – from Colonization to Counterrevolution, reflects on how Sudanese networks of care engender national and international solidarity through their art, dance, and music practices. Their research with Sudanese communities investigates the intersection of celebratory performances, women’s culture, and social change in Sudan’s history and present diaspora. shah’s book argues that Sudanese artists rewrite and remix the narratives, lyrics, and social scripts of cultural performance, creating spaces where celebration and revolution meet.

Displays of Sensibility: Undomesticated Women of the Theatre, 1750-1830
2026-27 Folger Institute Fellow

Anne-Claire Michoux is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich, specialising in British and Irish literature of the long eighteenth century. Her research interests include eighteenth-century and Romantic women’s writing, the novel, theatrical culture, performance history as well as contemporary Irish fiction. Her current project examines the representations of eighteenth-century actresses held in the Babette Craven Theatrical Memorabilia Collection. It considers how the visual depictions of eighteenth-century female performers, in engravings, statues, busts, porcelain figurines, cameos, watch-paper, and tea caddies, challenged contemporary discourses on femininity and female propriety, as objects entered the home and became a topic of conversation. It is part of a larger project that explores how women’s voices were represented, regulated, and staged in eighteenth-century theatrical culture.

Cut, Click, Copy, Keep: Fashioning Melancholic Girlhood in the Afterlives of Shakespeare’s Tragic Heroines
2026-27 Folger Institute Fellow

Transatlantic Choreographies of the Carved Gourd: Influence, and Material Culture in the Early Andean (New) World
2026-27 Folger Institute Fellow

Originally from Chile, Joaquín Molina is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology of the Americas at the University of Bonn, Germany. He holds an M.A. in Art Theory and History and a B.A. in Hispanic Language and Literature, both from the University of Chile. His research interests include the biographies of objects and their transcontinental diaspora, Andean ontology, and the analysis of Indigenous aesthtical phenomena.

Liquid Glass: Feminine Political Embodiement from the Middle Ages to Shakespeare
2026-27 Folger Institute Fellow

Kathryn Schubert is a PhD candidate in English at the University of California, Irvine. Her interests span medieval and early modern literature, focusing particularly on the intersections among gender, race, and the politicized body. Her dissertation project tracks images of glass and water—two substances linked visually and materially through emergent techniques of glassblowing—through medieval and early modern texts, arguing that the latent fluidity of glass signals an embodied and conceptual mutability that was crucial to the establishment of premodern hierarchies of gender and race. Her goal is to show how glass imagery became a useful literary tool for premodern authors attempting to negotiate a world in which categories of identity were growing increasingly flexible, expanding and contracting in order to rank and sort bodies. Kathryn is the recipient of UCI’s Donald & Dorothy Strauss Endowed Dissertation Fellowship and was a fellow of UCI’s New Swan Shakespeare Center.

The Manuscript and Material Culture Renaissance in post-Reformation English Catholicism, 1570-1660
2026-27 Folger Institute Fellow

Recipes for Life and Death in the Seventeenth-Century English Household
2026-27 Folger Institute Fellow

Colonial Textures: Touching, Holding, and Collecting the World in Early Modern England
2026-27 Folger Institute Fellow

Whitney Sperrazza is an Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M University. She is an interdisciplinary scholar of early modern literature and histories of science, with particular interests in poetics, gender theory, and media archaeology. She is the author of “Anatomical Forms: The Science of the Body in Early Modern Women’s Poetry” (Penn Press, 2025), as well as articles in ELR, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Shakespeare Quarterly, and Women’s Writing. Her new project (and Folger fellowship work) focuses on transatlantic touching and watery places in early English colonial encounters. Thinking with poets like Andrew Marvell, John Donne, and John Taylor, alongside 17th-century English cartographers, collectors, and sea captains, this project asks: What was the role of touch in structuring transatlantic encounters with people and places? How did England’s status as an island shape its imperial desires? How did English poetry reinforce and challenge those desires?

Seeds of Power: Ritual Dance, Poison, and the Politics of Healing and Harming in the Early Modern World and the Americas
2026-27 Folger Institute Fellow

Academic Politics Across Eurasisa: Jesuit Astronomy and the Uses of Chinese Evidence in the Newton Wars
2026-27 Folger Institute Fellow

Theatre and the Extra-Illustrated Book: Participatory Reading and Fandoms in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century England
2026-27 Folger Institute Fellow

Jane Wessel is an associate professor of English, specializing in eighteenth-century British literature and theatre history. She has particular interests in celebrity, book history, and the intersections of literature and law. Her first book, Owning Performance | Performing Ownership: Literary Property and the Eighteenth-Century British Stage (University of Michigan Press, 2022), examines the attempts of playwrights, actors, and theatre managers to “own” the ephemeral and unfixed performance of their plays in the era before legal protection for performance. Her current book project, Theatre and the Extra-Illustrated Book, extends this interest in ownership. But rather than focusing on ownership in a legal sense, this project considers battles over the “ownership” of shared cultural knowledge. Taking the extra-illustrated theatre book as its focus, this project maps the ways fans participated in constructing the biographies of their favorite performers.

Provenance: Early Modern Books and their Afterlives
2026-27 Folger Institute Fellow

I am a book historian and literary scholar, primarily of the early modern period. My current work is interested in the concept of provenance and how it affects collections of early modern books. I ask how libraries understand their own legacies, how they work to produce new forms of knowledge, and how this might allow us to interrogate our own digital, pedagogical, and institutional engagements with rare books. I am particularly interested in what it means for institutions to own and use books that have ‘difficult’ provenances, and what it means for these owner’s names to be perpetuated through library infrastructures; at the Folger, I will be looking at the entanglements between Henry Folger’s oil work and his library’s legacy.

Shakespeare in Sable, Vol. II: The Iconography of Black Artistic Intervention (1986–Present)
2026-27 Folger Institute Fellow

Dawn Monique Williams, a nationally celebrated theatre director, is a native of Oakland, CA, and has worked in theatre and film across the U.S. She holds an MA in Dramatic Literature, an MFA in Directing, certificates in Film Studies and Screenwriting, and is completing her dissertation, Beyond ‘Black Skin, White Masks’: Black Actors, Social Cognition, and Meaning Making on the U.S. Shakespearean Stage, at the University of Southern California. Her Folger research fellowship builds from her dissertation study toward her book project, Shakespeare in Sable, Vol. II: The Iconography of Black Artistic Intervention (1986–Present). Dawn’s poetry collection, Clothed in My Right Mind, was published in 2023, and she serves on the Board of Directors for Theatre Bay Area, the Playwrights’ Foundation, and sits on the Drama League National Directors Council. She is the head of Acting and Directing in the Theatre Program at Weber State University.