Cocktails & Conversation with Emily Lyon and Anne-Claire Michoux

Emily Lyon is a New York City-based director with 15+ years of experience shaping classic and contemporary texts. She is the co-founding Artistic Director of Expand the Canon – a call to action to include a global intersection of historic women playwrights in the classics. There, she researches all plays by all women and gender-expansive playwrights through history; the list has grown to over 11,000+ titles over the past six years. She has directed three full productions and seven readings of curated Expand the Canon plays, including at The Public Theater, American Shakespeare Center, and Island Shakespeare Festival. Expand the Canon highlights 52 plays by 50 historic gender-expansive writers from 1600-1990, and has partnered with companies across the country including Classic Stage Company, Fiasco Theater, American Shakespeare Center, Roundabout, INTAR, Island Shakespeare Festival, The Acting Company, the Folger, and more.

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.