Current and Upcoming Folger Institute Scholarly Programs

Updated May 28, 2026

The Folger Institute relies on our Consortium university partners and the expertise their representatives bring to plan, implement, and oversee a robust slate of Folger Institute Scholarly Programs. We thank them for their continuing collaboration since 1970.

Below are the descriptions for the Scholarly Programs on offer during 2026-2027. We have once again embraced a mix of in-person and combined mode programming across a wide range of topics, with an eye on reducing or eliminating barriers to inclusion as often as possible. To ensure that conversation is maintained at a high level, most require applications from those hoping to participate; this ensures that those selected and funded to attend will be strong contributors. The application deadlines are specified below with links to the application guidelines.

Participants are encouraged to pursue their individual research interests within a given program’s specific topic. Before submitting an application, applicants should read the description carefully so that they can tailor their statement of research plans to the program in question. Folger Institute Consortium affiliates should consult with their campus representatives and share their application materials ahead of time to ensure that they make their strongest case for admission. They should always address the specific overlap between the program’s description and what the applicant hopes to gain through participation and what they will bring to the program’s discussion and discoveries. Please visit Apply for Scholarly Programs for further details about the application process.

If you have an idea for a program, we plan to continue encouraging program proposals from scholars who want to offer a program at the Folger or on a Consortium university campus with unique, localized knowledge, underexplored archives, and diverse communities of inquiry and practice. The details of how one submits a program proposal are available on Folgerpedia.

For updates to programs and reminders about application deadlines, please subscribe to the bi-monthly newsletter, the Folger Research Bulletin.

If you have any questions about these programs, or the logistics of applying, email us at institute@folger.edu.

Please note: the program application portal opens one month before an application deadline, and decisions are typically announced within a month of that deadline.

Directed by Elisa Oh (Howard University)

The best research is based on inquiry and allows for serendipity. A scholar needs to sharpen research questions and search skills simultaneously and with sensitivity to the ways questions and sources affect each other. The available evidence may invite a new thesis, require a revised approach, or even suggest a new field of exploration. This intensive week is not designed to advance participants’ individual research projects. Rather, it aims to cultivate the participants’ curiosity about primary resources by using exercises that engage their research interests. It is offered to help early-stage graduate students develop a set of research-oriented literacies as they explore the Folger Collections in ways that will be useful for navigating other collections. With the guidance of visiting faculty and curatorial staff from the Folger, twelve to fourteen participants will examine bibliographical tools and their logics, hone their early modern book description skills, learn best practices for organizing and working with digital images, and improve their understanding of the cultural and technological histories of texts. Participants will ask reflexive questions about the nature of primary sources, the collections that house them, and the tools whereby one can access them.

Director: Elisa Oh is Associate Professor of English at Howard University, where she teaches Shakespeare, British literature surveys, and literary theory. Her research examines race and gender in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature, focusing on Shakespeare, Wroth, Cary, and Jacobean drama. Her work explores women’s silences, witch dances, court masques, and early travel narratives, and has appeared in leading journals and edited collections. Her current book project, Choreographies of Race and Gender, has been supported by NEH and Folger fellowships.

Anticipated Schedule: Tuesday through Saturday, August 4-8, 2026, at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

 Apply by March 2, 2026, for admission and grants-in-aid for Folger Institute Consortium affiliates.

Yearlong 2026-2027

Directed by Jenny C. Mann (New York University) and Nicholas Popper (William & Mary) 

This program focuses on the use of primary materials available for the study of the history, culture, society, and literature of early modern Britain, Europe, and the Atlantic World, broadly conceived. The goal throughout will be to foster interdisciplinary scholarship while considering broad methodological and theoretical problems relevant to current work in early modern studies, especially when working in fields that contain deliberate elisions and silences in their historical archives. Twelve to fourteen participants are welcome to explore the Folger Collections and other DC-area special collections to study a variety of printed and manuscript sources relevant to Ph.D. candidates in history and literature. Preference will be given to applicants who have completed course work and preliminary exams; they should be preparing a prospectus or beginning to draft chapters. Applicants should consult with their dissertation directors before applying to ensure that their work is at a stage that would benefit from the seminar, and their directors should certify that this is the case in their recommendation letters. Those whose dissertations are substantially complete will not be competitive applicants.

Directors:  Jenny C. Mann is Professor of English at New York University. She followed her first book, Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare’s England (2012), with The Trials of Orpheus: Poetry, Science, and the Early Modern Sublime (2021). Her forthcoming book is titled The Forms of Utopia: Paradox, Labyrinth, and Recursion in the Renaissance (2026).” Nicholas Popper is Professor of History at William & Mary. He is the author of Walter Ralegh’s History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance (2012) and The Specter of the Archive: Political Practice and the Information State in Early Modern Britain (2024). He is currently beginning a project on heraldic practices and social differentiation in early modern Britain.

Anticipated Schedule: Six Thursday afternoons, 1 to 4:30 p.m. Eastern: September 24, October 15, December 10, 2026; February 25, March 25, May 20, 2027. Admitted participants will receive two nights of lodging per in-person meeting and are expected to use that Friday to conduct research at the Folger Shakespeare Library and other DC-area collections. The October and March sessions will be virtual.

Apply by July 13, 2026, for admission and grants-in-aid for Folger Institute Consortium affiliates. The program is restricted to Consortium affiliates only.

Fall 2026

Directed by Katherine Williams (University of Toronto), Kim Weild (Carnegie Mellon University), Andrew Morrill (Director of Artistic Sign Language), and Alexandria Wailes (Director of Artistic Sign Language)

This three-part workshop explores the translation of Shakespeare’s dramatic texts into American Sign Language (ASL). Across two virtual and one in-person sessions, theatremakers and scholars will consider how the linguistic resources of visual language illuminate and transform familiar Shakespearean lines and how Shakespeare’s poetics heighten the artistic complexity of ASL. Sessions will survey current translation practices and consider how formal elements of Shakespeare’s verse can enrich new sign formation, drawing on expertise from Directors of Artistic Sign Language (DASLs), scholars, and theatremakers. The final gathering at the Folger Theatre will enable participants to share their work and experiment with the negotiation of meaning in embodied performance, taking theoretical concepts of translation to the stage. Proposals that theorize knowledge exchange in current ASL/Shakespeare translation projects, foreground translation methods using examples from specific Shakespearean passages, or critically engage concepts from early modern poetics or visual culture relevant to ASL translation are invited. Collaborative projects are welcome; we are particularly interested in practice-based analyses that illuminates methodological strategies for translation and expands the ASL Shakespeare lexicon.

Director: Andrew Morrill is an Obie award-winning theatremaker and actor with extensive experience in creative translation and artistic sign language direction. Alexandria Wailes is a multi-hyphenated artist whose award-winning work includes acting, dancing, directing, choreography, and DASL (director of artistic sign language). Kim Weild is Professor of Directing and Chair of the John Wells Directing Program at Carnegie Mellon University. Katherine Williams is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto and author of Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theater (2021).

Invited Speakers: The in-person meeting will open on Thursday afternoon with an opening plenary session by Jill Marie Bradbury (University of Maryland, College Park). Additional invited speakers will be announced in the coming weeks.

Anticipated Schedule: Thursday afternoon through Saturday, September 24-26 (virtual), Friday, October 30 (virtual), and Thursday afternoon through Saturday, December 3-5 (on-site).

Apply by July 13, 2026, for admission and grants-in-aid for Folger Institute Consortium affiliates. Feel free to link to a video file as part of your application documents. 

Directed by Catherine Nicholson (Yale University) and Jeff Dolven (Princeton University)

“Begin at the beginning … and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” The King’s advice to the White Rabbit only gets a reader of early modern sentences so far. This workshop considers what remains: questions of language, syntax, meaning, tone, affect, style, history, and genre. We’ll explore what an early modern sentence is—an oral form or a written one? English or Latin? a grammatical structure or a unit of thought?—and how it relates to other foundational forms, like the sententia, the period, or the line of verse. Participants will contribute to (and help lead discussions about) an archive of exemplary instances: sentences that either anchor or stymie our understanding of a particular writer or text; sentences we love; sentences we wish we had written; and sentences we don’t think are—or should be—sentences at all. Together we’ll arrive at a better understanding of the forms early modern sentences take, the work they do, and the many ways they can be read.

Director: Jeff Dolven teaches poetry and poetics, especially of the English Renaissance, at Princeton University. He is the author of Scenes of Instruction (2007), Senses of Style (2018), and the admittedly hasty Take Care (2017), as well as two books of poems. He was the founding director of Princeton’s Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities (IHUM) and is an editor-at-large at Cabinet magazine. Catherine Nicholson is a Professor of English and Early Modern Studies at Yale University. She is the author of Reading and Not Reading The Faerie Queene (2020) and Uncommon Tongues: Eloquence and Eccentricity in the English Renaissance (2014). Her current project, “The Renaissance Before Reading,” connects the materials of basic literacy–letter, syllable, word, sentence, and book–to the re-making of early modern literary culture.

Anticipated Schedule: Friday and Saturday, October 9-10, 2026. 

Apply by July 13, 2026, for admission and grants-in-aid for Folger Institute Consortium affiliates. 

Directed by Heather Wolfe (Folger Shakespeare Library)

This weeklong course provides an intensive introduction to handwriting in early modern England, with a particular emphasis on the English secretary hand of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Working from digitized and physical manuscripts, participants will be trained in the accurate reading and transcription of secretary, italic, and mixed hands. The workshop’s focus will include recipe books, personal correspondence, and poetry miscellanies drawn from the Folger collection. Participants will experiment with contemporary writing materials (quills, iron gall ink, and paper); learn the terminology for describing and comparing letterforms; and become skillful decipherers of abbreviations, numbers, and dates. Transcriptions made by participants will become part of the Early Modern Manuscripts Online (EMMO) corpus.

Director: Heather Wolfe is Consulting Curator of Manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She was formerly Associate Librarian, co-director of the multi-year research project Before ‘Farm to Table’: Early Modern Foodways and Cultures, and Principal Investigator of Early Modern Manuscripts Online. Author of numerous articles on early modern manuscripts, Dr. Wolfe has edited The Literary Career and Legacy of Elizabeth Cary, 1613–1680 (2007), The Trevelyon Miscellany of 1608: A Facsimile Edition of Folger Shakespeare Library MS V.b.232 (2007), Letterwriting in Renaissance England (2004) (with Alan Stewart), and Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland: Life and Letters (2001). She is currently working on a book on early modern writing paper in England.

Anticipated Schedule: Tuesday through Saturday, December 8-12, 2026.

Apply by July 13, 2026, for admission and grants-in-aid for Folger Institute Consortium affiliates. N.B., Undergraduate seniors who are continuing to graduate school and want to get a head start on developing their research skills are eligible to apply for this program.

Spring 2027

Cosponsored by Folger Consort, honoring its 50th anniversary

Organized by Co-Artistic Directors of the Folger Consort Robert Eisenstein (Mount Holyoke College) and Christopher Kendall (University of Michigan) with music historian Evan A. MacCarthy (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

Marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Folger Consort, Early European Music Now brings together musicians and scholars for three days of focused inquiry and artistic exchange. Broad in scope and forward-looking in perspective, the symposium asks not only what early music has been but what it might become. Workshops pairing performers with musically oriented scholars will explore the questions that animate the field today: how historical sources become living performance; what notation, treatises, and iconography can and cannot tell us; how musicians’ migration and the circulation of manuscript and printed music shaped the repertoires we study and perform; and how early music’s intersections with dance, visual culture, and literary culture continue to generate new possibilities. A plenary conversation will address the next half-century of research and performance, while evening events, including a musical tribute and a public concert by the Folger Consort, carry the symposium’s themes from conversations to the stage. Applications are welcomed from scholars and musicians eager to contribute to these urgent conversations about the future of early European music in research, performance, and the classroom. 

Organizers: Robert Eisenstein, former director of the Five College Early Music Program and Senior Lecturer Emeritus in Music at Mount Holyoke College, where he taught music history and directed student ensembles including the Collegium Musicum and the baroque band Euridice Ensemble.  He also taught music history and directed the Madrigal Singers at the University of Massachusetts. He has performed on the viola da gamba, violin, and medieval fiddle with the New York Renaissance Band, Cappella Nova, the New York Consort of Viols, the Washington Bach Consort, the National Symphony, and in his capacity as a founding member and programming director of the Folger Consort. Christopher Kendall is professor emeritus and former dean of the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre, and Dance. He is also artistic director of the 21st Century Consort, new music ensemble-in-residence at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum. Mr. Kendall served as director of the University of Maryland School of Music and director of the music division and Tanglewood Institute of Boston University, and was associate conductor of the Seattle Symphony. He has conducted, recorded, and toured with many orchestras and ensembles in repertoire from the 18th to the 21st century, and is the founder and a co-director of the Folger Consort. Evan A. MacCarthy, Associate Professor of Music History, University of Massachusetts Amherst, whose research spans fifteenth-century music and music theory, late medieval chant, and early modern humanism. His forthcoming book, Ruled by the Muses, examines Italian humanists and their study of music; he is also preparing a critical edition and translation of Ugolino of Orvieto’s Declaratio musicae disciplinae. He is a fellow of the American Academy in Rome and Villa I Tatti, and co-organizer of the biennial University of Massachusetts Amherst Bach Festival & Symposium. 

Invited presenters to be announced in the coming weeks. 

Anticipated Schedule: Thursday afternoon through Saturday, February 4-6, 2027.

Apply by November 2, 2026, for admission and grants-in-aid for Folger Institute Consortium affiliates.

Co-directed by Jodi Byrd (University of Chicago), Kimberly Anne Coles (University of Maryland), Sharon P. Holland (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), and Greta LaFleur (Yale University). 

Ideas of heredity are as much about the present and future as about the past. They are an imaginative structure of chronological time, kinship, custody, and rights. But settler colonial ideologies of heredity and kinship in the Americas are unique, and uniquely linear in their formations. They mobilize a different history, tying Europe to the Americas, and the medieval and early modern periods to the present. They tie blood – and its letting – to land enclosure and property transfer; notions of heredity are thus one means by which blood and belonging are articulated as capital. Heredity and its presumed possession legitimated belonging, exclusion, rights, and claims to identity, from early modern Europe through modern settler colonialism in the Americas. This symposium will put scholars working on a range of fields, regions, and historical periods into conversation in order to explore questions surrounding the political, social, and demographic lives of heredity over the longue durée. Heredity—as a tactic of biopower, including racialization—will be the thematic focus of the seminar, which will encourage scholars working on a diverse array of regions and periods to build broader historical, theoretical, and regional specificity to their research on these issues.  

Director: Jodi Byrd is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and professor in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. Their most recent book, Indigenomicon: American Indians, Video Games, and the Structures of Dispossession (2025), examines the conditions for ground and relationality structured into Indigenous dispossession. Kimberly Anne Coles is Professor of English at the University of Maryland. Her recent book, Bad Humor: Race and Religious Essentialism in Early Modern England (2022), deals with the medical and philosophical context that makes religion—or irreligion—a heritable feature of the blood. She has published articles in Criticism, Profession, ELR, Modern Philology, and Renaissance Quarterly and has co-edited several collections on topics of race, sex, and gender. Sharon P. Holland’s third monograph, an other: a black feminist consideration of animal life (2023), is an investigation of the hum/animal distinction, hum:animal relation, and the place of discourse on blackness within those theoretical discussions. Her next book projects take up those conversations across two fields, Critical Food Studies and “Outsider” Art. Greta LaFleur is Associate Professor of American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University; their scholarship focuses on the histories of race, gender, sexuality, science and law in British colonial North America. Their first book, The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America, argues that natural history, as an early modern and eighteenth-century form of race science, created the epistemological conditions for the emergence of human sexual behavior as a discrete site for scientific inquiry.  

Invited Speakers: On Thursday afternoon, Jennifer L. Morgan  (New York University) and Brooke Bauer (University of Tennessee, Knoxville) will open the symposium with a plenary session on “Family, Kinship, and Property.” On Friday afternoon, a second plenary session welcomes Daniel Heath Justice (University of British Columbia) and Kevin E. Quashie (Brown University) for presentations on “Indigeneity, Coloniality, and the Human.” Additional invited speakers will be announced in the coming weeks.

Anticipated Schedule: Thursday afternoon through Saturday, March 18-20, 2027. 

Apply by November 2, 2026, for admission and grants-in-aid for Folger Institute Consortium affiliates.

Directed by Carol Mejia LaPerle (Wright State University) 

Drawing on seventeenth-century social contract theory, literature, political pamphlets, medical treatises, and images of death, decay, plague, and survival found in the Folger collection, this undergraduate colloquy puts Shakespeare and his contemporaries in dialogue with the zombie apocalypse. Twelve to fourteen participants will examine how the history of affect helps us understand early modern responses to social threats and how early modern representations of those threats have been formative in the modern portrayal of the zombie. Using monster theory as a lens, we will analyze responses to and representations of social collapse—such as fear, disgust, and desperation—to consider the emotional mechanisms accompanying and mobilizing the management of bodily contagion, civil dissolution, and mass crises. The undead invite reflection on a culture’s biopolitics of survival and the underlying inequities that determine whose lives are protected and whose dystopia matters. How might the apocalypse provoke new ways of reimagining the social contract itself? What affective responses enable a more functional, ethical, and just society in the face of social devastation? Participants will outline their own “Modern Social Contract” and create public-facing projects that draw from personal reflection, archival research, critical theory, and creative inquiry.

Director: Carol Mejia LaPerle is Professor and Honors Advisor for the Department of English at Wright State University. Her research interests include Renaissance / early modern drama, poetry and culture, critical race theory, gender studies, philosophies of will, and affective performances of and in Shakespeare. She regularly teaches a survey of early English literature, special topics in early modern drama, and the methods and materials of academic research.

Anticipated Schedule: Ten Thursday afternoons, virtually, from 2-4 p.m. Eastern, January 22 through April 9, 2027, except for Friday, March 5. A final in-person session will be held at the Folger Shakespeare Library during the weeklong celebration of Shakespeare’s Birthday. All admitted participants will receive support to offset their travel and lodging costs.

Apply by November 2, 2026, for admission and grants-in-aid for Folger Institute Consortium affiliates.

Directed by Howard Marchitello (Rutgers-Camden), Daniel Blank (Free Library of Philadelphia), and Kristen Poole (University of Delaware)

This program explores Philadelphia’s extensive, complex, and often overlooked engagement with Shakespeare. Philadelphia is the site of many American “firsts”: including the first edition of Shakespeare’s works, the first professional stagings of Hamlet, the Variorum edition, and the founding of the Philadelphia Shakspere Society. The relationship between the city and the Bard has been constant, from Philadelphia’s nineteenth-century theaters to today’s professional and alternative companies, from its schools and universities to its print shops and libraries. To Celebrate and To Contest features academic presentations alongside public-facing talks and performances in historic Philadelphia venues dedicated to understanding the city’s ongoing embrace of Shakespeare. That embrace, however, has not always been warm: at times it has been combative, more a headlock than a hug that serves to prompt new creative work contesting “settled” social and political norms, as well as the very idea of Shakespeare as cultural and aesthetic touchstone. We invite scholars and educators interested in the practices of local and regional Shakespeare and the history of Philadelphia’s cultural richness to join this workshop. 

Directors: Howard Marchitello is University Professor of English, Rutgers University-Camden and Co-Chair of the New Jersey Council for the Humanities Board of Trustees. His publications include Remediating Shakespeare and The Machine in the Text. Prior Folger work includes participation in the “Shakespeare, Publics, and the Humanities” colloquium and membership on the Folger Institute Consortium Executive Committee. Daniel Blank is Managing Director of Public Programs at the Free Library of Philadelphia Foundation, where he leads the nationally renowned Author Events series. His first book, Shakespeare and University Drama in Early Modern England, was published by Oxford University Press. He has also written for the Times Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. Kristen Poole, the Ned B. Allen Professor of English at the University of Delaware, has published extensively on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature and culture. She recently published Philip Pullman and the Historical Imagination: Seventeenth-Century Literature, Science, and Religion in His Dark Materials and The Book of Dust (2025). She is the General Editor of the large-scale digital project Routledge Resources Online: The Renaissance World. 

Invited speakers will be announced in the coming weeks.

Anticipated Schedule: Thursday evening through Saturday, April 22-24, 2027.

Apply by November 2, 2026, for admission and grants-in-aid for Folger Institute Consortium affiliates. 

Sponsored by the Center for Early Modern Political Thought

Co-directed by Nigel Smith (Princeton) and Claudia Swan (Washington University  in St. Louis)

The global presence of the Dutch Republic and the trading prowess of the early modern southern Netherlands animate distinct histories and historiographies. Yet, with the exception of the histories of law and philosophy exemplified by Grotius and Spinoza, the political thought and culture in the Dutch Republic and the Spanish Netherlands tend to be studied in isolation. However, recent approaches have seen a new comparative emphasis that is invigorated by interdisciplinary inquiry, placing Netherlandish political life and culture in dynamic interaction with the cultures of other places across the globe. Applications are welcomed from advanced graduate students and early career faculty in all humanities disciplines working on Netherlandish topics, especially those with comparative and global dimensions. Each participant will circulate and discuss their project’s abstract and may present portions of a work-in-progress or lead discussions on an object of analysis (including any form of cultural production, whether text, visual art, and/or performance). They will receive feedback from both workshop leaders and fellow participants.

Director: Nigel Smith is William and Annie S. Paton Foundation Professor of Ancient and Modern Literature at Princeton University. He has published widely on seventeenth-century English literature, especially Marvell, Milton, and radicalism. More recently he has focused on early modern Dutch literature in comparative context, including Bredero, Vondel, Tesselschade, Vos, and Oudaan. Polyglot Poetics: Transnational Early Modern Literature is shortly forthcoming. Claudia Swan, Mark Steinberg Weil Professor of Art History & Archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis, is a scholar of early modern art history, history of science, material culture studies, and global trade and politics. Recent publications include Rarities of These Lands: Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Dutch Republic and the co-authored volume Conchophilia: Shells, Art, and Curiosity in Early Modern Europe.

Anticipated Schedule: Friday and Saturday, May 7-8, 2027.

Apply by November 2, 2026, for admission and grants-in-aid for Folger Institute Consortium affiliates. 

Summer 2027

Directed by Elisa Oh (Howard University) 

The best research is based on inquiry and allows for serendipity. A scholar needs to sharpen research questions and search skills simultaneously and with sensitivity to the ways questions and sources affect each other. The available evidence may invite a new thesis, require a revised approach, or even suggest a new field of exploration. This intensive week is not designed to advance participants’ individual research projects. Rather, it aims to cultivate the participants’ curiosity about primary resources by using exercises that engage their research interests. It is offered to help early-stage graduate students develop a set of research-oriented literacies as they explore the Folger Collections in ways that will be useful for navigating other collections. With the guidance of visiting faculty and curatorial staff from the Folger, twelve to fourteen participants will examine bibliographical tools and their logics, hone their early modern book description skills, learn best practices for organizing and working with digital images, and improve their understanding of the cultural and technological histories of texts. Participants will ask reflexive questions about the nature of primary sources, the collections that house them, and the tools whereby one can access them.

Director: Elisa Oh is Associate Professor of English at Howard University, where she teaches Shakespeare, British literature surveys, and literary theory. Her research examines race and gender in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature, focusing on Shakespeare, Wroth, Cary, and Jacobean drama. Her work explores women’s silences, witch dances, court masques, and early travel narratives, and has appeared in leading journals and edited collections. Her current book project, Choreographies of Race and Gender, has been supported by NEH and Folger fellowships.

Anticipated Schedule: Tuesday through Saturday, August 3-7, 2027, at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Apply: by March 1, 2027, for admission and grants-in-aid for Folger Institute Consortium affiliates.