Booking and details
Dates Thu, Feb 12, 2026 at 4:30pm
Venue Great Hall
Tickets Free; no ticket required
Transit and the early Caribbean. Musical health regimens in early modern England. Environmental change and animal encounters with colonization in Ireland.
Interested? Join us for the next Folger Salon.
About Folger Salon
Learn about research happening at the Folger in real time! Each month, Folger Institute scholar and artist fellows will share their most exciting finds and thought-provoking challenges, followed by casual open conversation. Arrive early to purchase food and drink from the Folger’s new café, Quill & Crumb.
This is a free event. Seating is limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis.
Speakers
Jareema Hylton
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.”
Sarah Koval
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.
Victoria McAlister
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.
About Folger Institute
The Folger Institute is a center for early modern research at the Folger Shakespeare Library that brings public audiences together with researchers to explore the cultures and legacies of the early modern world. Learn more.
See what our fellows are researching
Artist Dominick Porras Reconstructs Classical Narratives of the Americas
Porras, a Folger Artist Fellow, shares what inspired him, from the Folger collection to Indigenous futurism, in the creation of his new media work, de Bry’s Slipstream.
Top five Collation blog posts of 2025
Take a look at our top five Collation posts from 2025. Thanks for a great year!
“Greetings from Jamaica”
Seventeenth century resonances in a twentieth century postcard sent from Jamaica.
How to be a true widow in early modern England
“Do not seek pleasure in music and singing” and other advice for widows from an early 17th-century manuscript.
Third Time’s a Charm: W. Blount Reads Sidney’s Arcadia
An examination of marginalia in the Folger’s 1593 The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia