Lily McKee High School Fellowship

The Folger Shakespeare Library invites high school sophomores, juniors, and seniors from across the greater Washington area to apply to be Lily McKee High School Fellows.

Over five months from January 2027 through May 2027, this year’s cohort of around 20 fellows will explore Hamlet through three connected lenses: scholarship, research, and performance – and create a project of their own along the way.

The fellowship does not require prior experience with Shakespeare, prior performance experience, or a ready-made interpretation of Hamlet. Curiosity is the only prerequisite.

Hamlet

Each generation has its Shakespeare. Each generation has its Hamlet.

Hamlet is about grief that has nowhere to go. It is about revenge, and the doubt that stalls it. It is about how we act when we cannot be certain. It is about the strange theater of watching and being watched.

It is about what it is like to be, and what it is like not to be.

What does Hamlet have to say to your generation?

The Lily McKee High School Fellowship is one of the Folger’s signature programs for young people – and a rare opportunity for high school students to work inside the world’s largest Shakespeare collection. Each year, a small cohort of students is invited into the Folger’s Reading Room, Theatre, and galleries, alongside the scholars, artists, librarians, and educators who make their lives there. Most arrive as strangers. They leave as a community that thinks hard together.

This year’s cohort will focus on Hamlet. Over five months, fellows encounter Hamlet not simply as a play to read, but as a living work that can be questioned, researched, performed, and reimagined.

At the center of the fellowship, each fellow develops a project of their own. Working from objects in the Folger’s collection, fellows trace how the ideas, relationships, and symbols of Hamlet and the early modern world reach into our present moment in 2027 – and build something of their own out of that connection.

The three lenses of the program feed directly into this work: fellows debate the play in seminar, examine its sources in the collection, and embody its language as performers.

Read a recent article about the Lily McKee High School Fellowship: Folger Magazine (PDF)

Scholarship

In seminars and lectures, fellows will encounter Hamlet and the early modern world that produced it. These sessions are conversations to join: fellows read closely, ask hard questions, disagree thoughtfully, and build interpretations of their own. Sessions move through the play act by act, opening up its language, its sources, and the arguments that have surrounded it for four centuries.

Research

The Folger holds the world’s largest Shakespeare collection, and McKee Fellows gain hands-on access to it. With guidance from Folger staff, fellows will work in the Reading Room with original materials, including early printed books and manuscripts, as well as the digital tools used to study them. Hamlet is an especially rich case for this work, surviving in early printed versions that differ from one another in striking ways. Fellows will confront firsthand the questions that arise when a play we think we know turns out to exist in more than one form. They will learn what it means to build an argument from primary sources, to investigate evidence, and to bring their own questions to the archive.

Performance

Shakespeare wrote his plays to be spoken, staged, and felt, and the McKee Fellowship begins from that premise. Working with accomplished theatre artists and educators, fellows will get Hamlet into their mouths and onto their feet: speaking the verse, testing the choices an actor makes line by line, and finding the meaning that surfaces only in performance. They will work as an ensemble, learning to listen and respond the way the play’s own characters must. The performance strand leads to attending Folger Theatre’s production of Hamlet, where fellows watch professional artists wrestle with the same scenes they have explored themselves.

An original project

At the center of the fellowship is a final project of each fellow’s own. Working from objects in the Folger collection and ideas explored throughout the program, fellows develop projects that connect Hamlet and the early modern world to questions that matter in the present moment. Projects may take many forms. Fellows might write, perform, make, curate, design, research, or create something entirely unexpected. The goal is not to produce the “right” interpretation of Hamlet, but to follow a question, pursue an idea, and make something that could not have existed without the fellow’s own curiosity and work.

Community

The heart of the McKee Fellowship is its cohort. Fellows come from public, private, charter, parochial, and home schools across the greater Washington area, and many will not have met before the first session. Together, they become something more than a class or a club: a group of young people willing to take intellectual risks together, ask difficult questions, change their minds, disagree thoughtfully, and take one another’s ideas seriously. They learn from teachers and texts, and just as much from one another. The connections formed in the cohort regularly outlast the fellowship itself.