Scope and Approach
Teaching Shakespeare Institute 2026
Shakespeare: Love and Infamy: Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra in Conversation
Scope and Approach
The 2026 Teaching Shakespeare Institute will bring together 25 middle and high school teachers from across the country for a three-week residential experience at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC to explore two of Shakespeare’s most resonant tragedies, Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra, through the combined lenses of scholarship, performance, and classroom practice.
Teachers will study and collaborate in spaces such as the Folger’s Reading Room, which houses the world’s largest Shakespeare collection, including rare books, manuscripts, and archival materials. They will also work in the newly constructed Learning Lab and explore the Folger’s exhibition galleries, where selections from the permanent and rotating collections are displayed. The galleries feature materials connected to the Folger’s holdings of 82 First Folios, the first edition of Shakespeare’s collected plays published in 1623. Guided by performance faculty, participants will take part in regular performance sessions on the stage of the Folger’s Elizabethan-styled Theatre exploring how voice, movement, and staging deepen understanding of the plays.
TSI brings Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra into conversation in order to give teachers a fresh way to consider Shakespeare’s most immersive love stories. Although written at different moments in Shakespeare’s career and set in very different worlds, the two plays share striking thematic and dramatic concerns. Both focus on lovers whose private commitments come into conflict with powerful public forces. Both follow couples whose relationships unfold in highly charged political environments, where family loyalty, civic duty, and the demands of empire shape the stakes of every choice. Both plays also explore the intensity of desire through some of Shakespeare’s most vivid language, from the compressed energy of Romeo and Juliet’s early encounters to the expansive poetry that surrounds Antony and Cleopatra’s shifting fortunes.
Studying the plays side by side reveals how Shakespeare revisits similar questions about youth and maturity, risk and responsibility, and the costs of devotion. Romeo and Juliet examines the speed and urgency of first love in a world shaped by inherited conflict. Antony and Cleopatra turns to a later moment in life and shows how passion can redefine a public figure who stands at the center of global power. When placed in dialogue, the two plays illuminate each other, offering teachers a richer understanding of how Shakespeare experiments with structure, imagery, and character to portray love as a force that reshapes individuals and nations alike.
Through seminars, lectures, performance workshops, and independent research in the Folger’s collection, participants will strengthen their command of Shakespeare’s language and develop new tools for guiding students through complex texts in the classroom. By studying two plays that mirror and challenge each other, teachers will deepen their understanding of Shakespeare’s craft and expand their repertoire of strategies for engaging students in meaningful, text-centered learning.
Project Schedule and Assignments
The daily life of the Teaching Shakespeare Institute participant is full and engaging. TSI is designed to be rigorous, discovery-filled, joyful, and energizing. Participants can expect daily lectures from leading researchers to help contextualize the plays, seminar meetings with faculty to read and discuss each work closely, studio classes that explore the transformative effects of performing Shakespeare’s scenes, and curricular workshops that bring everything together through the Folger Method. Days are long and full, and because Shakespeare: Love and Infamy is a three-week Institute, there will be some evening and weekend programs and work as well.
A daylong field trip to Historic Jamestowne will provide an opportunity to explore the historic fort, museum, and ongoing archaeological digs. The site offers a powerful way to consider how Shakespeare’s work circulated in early colonial America and how the stories and histories within Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra connect to the broader cultural forces of the early modern period.
By the end of the Teaching Shakespeare Institute, teachers will complete an assignment that draws on their multi-disciplinary experience. Participants will design a lesson plan or classroom activity that reflects their work with scholarship, performance, primary sources, and pedagogy, and that is tailored to the needs of their own students.
Who Are We?
Teaching Shakespeare Institute 2026 participants will work with the following faculty and staff during their three weeks of discovery at the Folger:
Co-Directors
David Kilpatrick
David Kilpatrick, co-director of TSI, is the Director of Learning and Education Programs at the Folger Shakespeare Library, where he oversees educational resources and leads new efforts to enable teachers, young people, and the broader public to put Shakespeare and the humanities to use in addressing contemporary challenges. David guides the strategic development and implementation of educational programming to support local, national, and virtual audiences. David previously served as Senior Director of Education Programs and Productions at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where he oversaw the Education Division’s Music Education, Theater Education, and Dance Education portfolios, including school and family programming with the National Symphony Orchestra and Washington National Opera. He joined the Kennedy Center in 2007 as the Manager of Theatre for Young Audiences. Prior to his time in Washington, DC, David worked in the education departments of the New Victory Theater in New York and Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia.
Ellen MacKay
Dr. Ellen MacKay, head scholar and TSI co-director, is Associate Professor of English and Chair of Theatre and Performance Studies (TAPS) at University of Chicago, where she teaches courses on Shakespeare, Renaissance Drama, Performance Historiography, and Theater Theory. She is author of Persecution, Plague and Fire: Fugitive Histories of the Stage in Early Modern England (Chicago, 2011), and director of the Folger-Luminary iPad app of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She is also author of the scholarly and highly popular essay in The Folger Guide to Teaching Romeo and Juliet: “What Happens to Verona when Torches Burn Bright?” She has published articles in Theatre Survey, Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare Yearbook, and Theatre History Studies, and in numerous edited volumes and disciplinary guides, including the forthcoming The Routledge Companion to Shakespeare and Religion. She is working on two book projects: one on the theatre audience as a laboratory of social forms, and another that takes shrew-taming as the basis of an alternative concept of the theater. MacKay is head of the Shakespeare stream of CEDAR, which curates the variant texts and multiform contexts of The Taming of the Shrew.
Visiting Scholars
Dr. Farah Karim-Cooper
Dr. Karim-Cooper is the Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library. She previously served as Head of Research and then Director of Education and Research at Shakespeare’s Globe in London from 2004-2024, and she was appointed Professor of Shakespeare Studies at King’s College London from 2020-2024. She served as President of the Shakespeare Association of America from 2021-2022 after serving 5 years on their Board of Trustees. She is a field leader in the theaters of Shakespeare’s time and was a project leader in the construction of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, the indoor PREVIEW Date: Feb 13, 2025 Workspace ID: WS01472414 Funding Opportunity Number: 20250212-EH-ES 8 Jacobean theater at Shakespeare’s Globe.
Dr. Ian Smith
Dr. Ian Smith is Professor of English and Richard H., Jr. ’60 and Joan K. Sell Chair in the Humanities at Lafayette College. He discovered Shakespeare while studying French classical theater at the University of Paris before completing his PhD at Columbia University.
Dr. William West
Dr. William West is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University. He is a recent Chair of the Department of Classics and an expert in the uses made of antiquity in Renaissance theater. His most recent book, Common Understanding, Poetic Confusions: Playhouses and Playgoers in Elizabethan England (University of Chicago Press, 2021), won the Joe A. Callaway Prize for Best Book on Drama and Theatre by New York University.
Faculty
Noelle Cammon
Noelle Cammon, mentor teacher and K-12 education specialist teaches English at Heritage High School in Menifee, California. During her career, she has taught English in both middle and high school and to students from across a broad range of ability levels and cultures. She was a stand-out participant in the Folger NEH summer program in 2018, and soon after, at the Folger’s invitation, became heavily involved in the work of Folger Education. Ms. Cammon is a contributor to The Folger Guides to Teaching Shakespeare, authoring the five-week unit plan on teaching Othello. She served as a mentor teacher in the Folger’s 2024 NEH summer institute and has led many online Folger professional development sessions for teachers from across the country.
Dr. Deborah Gascon
Dr. Deborah Gascon, mentor teacher and K-12 education specialist has spent the majority of her 27-year career teaching high school English at Dutch Fork High School, a public school near Columbia, South Carolina. She was a standout participant—in the Folger’s NEH summer program in 2012—and since then has served as an important contributor to Folger Education work. Dr. Gascon is also a contributing author to The Folger Guide to Teaching Romeo and Juliet. In addition, she has led a broad range of Folger courses and workshops, has been lead mentor teacher at Folger summer academies in 2015, 2017, and 2019, and a mentor teacher in the Folger’s 2024 summer institute.
Ms. Cammon and Dr. Gascon are a pair of experienced collaborators who will jointly lead participating teachers across all three weeks of the institute in the process of bringing their new knowledge into teaching and learning in their classrooms. Past participants in every institute have made note of the importance of this part of their work, preparing them to bring what they have learned here back to their students and colleagues.
Kyle Grady
Dr. Kyle Grady, resident scholar, is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. He was an immensely popular resident scholar in previous Folger institutes in 2021 and 2024. Broadly his research explores the influence of early modern literature and culture, with a focus on Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. Grady also writes on Shakespeare pedagogy. His research appears in the journals Early Modern Culture, New Literary History, Pedagogy, Shakespeare Studies, and Shakespeare Quarterly. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan.
Caleen Sinnette Jennings
Caleen Sinnette Jennings will engage participants in performance-related explorations of Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra. She is Professor Emerita of Theatre at American University where she taught Acting, Voice & Speech, Acting Shakespeare, Playwriting, and academic courses in theater. She has received commissions from Arena Stage, the Kennedy Center, the Phillips Collection, Everyman Theatre, and other cultural institutions. Plays in her Queens Girl Trilogy have been produced off-Broadway and regionally. She received a Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Emerging Theatre for her work with The Welders Playwrights’ Collective, in addition to five Helen Hayes nominations for Outstanding New Play. She is currently working on the book for a new musical on the life of contralto Marian Anderson. She has been an institute faculty member since 1994.
Staff
Folger Learning and Education Programs
Liam Dempsey
Liam Dempsey is the Folger’s Associate Director of Education. He will work with the mentor teachers in planning and implementing curriculum work before and during the institute, and support participating teachers in their curriculum work and final project. Prior to joining the Folger, Liam taught middle and high school English in Maryland. He is an alumnus of the 2021 TSI and served on the project team for the 2024 TSI.
Ava Gadon
Ava Gadon is the administrative coordinator for Learning and Education Programs at the Folger Shakespeare Library.
The Folger Shakespeare Library
The Folger Shakespeare Library makes Shakespeare’s stories and the world in which he lived accessible. Anchored by the world’s largest Shakespeare collection, the Folger is a place where curiosity and creativity are embraced and conversation is always encouraged.
The Folger houses more than 160,000 printed books, 60,000 manuscripts, and 90,000 prints, drawings, photographs, paintings, and other works of art, along with extensive performance history including a quarter of a million playbills, films, recordings, and stage costumes.
During their time at the Folger, teachers will work with Collections and Exhibitions staff and faculty on a research project that incorporates a selected item from the collection. Each participant will use this item as a foundation for creating unique instructional materials that connect the research experience to their own school context.
Folger Learning and Education Programs
For more than four decades, Folger Learning and Education Programs has helped teachers and students bring Shakespeare and other complex texts to life through active, language-based learning. The Folger is a leader in showing how the study of Shakespeare deepens knowledge and hones skills across key academic areas, and in bringing students of all ability levels to close reading that builds the deep reading skills essential for success.
More than two million teachers and students each year benefit from workshops, lesson plans, online classes and field trips, the best-selling Folger Editions of Shakespeare’s plays, and The Folger Guides to Teaching Shakespeare. As members of our flagship education program, Institute participants will join the heart of this rigorous and exciting work.
The Folger Method empowers students to engage directly with challenging texts, make discoveries through performance, and build confidence as readers, writers, and thinkers. To learn more about the Folger Method, please visit: www.folger.edu/teach/the-folger-method/.
Participants in the Teaching Shakespeare Institute will experience the Folger Method firsthand and leave with practical classroom strategies, resources, and a professional network that continues to support their work long after the Institute concludes.