Booking and details
Dates Thu, Nov 12, 2025 at 4:30pm
Venue Great Hall
Tickets Free; no ticket required
Caribbean Shakespeares. Chaucer’s Black London. Spirituality in the colonial Philippines.
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
Virginia M. Burnett
2025-26 Short-term Fellow
Caribbean Shakespeares
This project offers an in-depth exploration of all things Shakespeare in the Caribbean, examining how his works have been interpreted, adapted, and performed throughout the region. It highlights the unique cultural, historical, and linguistic influences that shape Caribbean responses to Shakespearean drama. From stage productions to literary reinterpretations, the project reveals how Shakespeare’s legacy continues to resonate in diverse Caribbean contexts. Through this lens, it also considers issues of colonialism, identity, and cultural hybridity.
Dorothy Kim
2025-26 Long-term Fellow
Chaucer’s Black London
In November 2023, the UK minister Kemi Badenoch lodged a formal complaint against the Museum of London about an article I collaboratively published with several bioanthropologists and a bioarchaeologist. Her complaint called the work documenting the presence of fourteenth-century, London Black communities “woke archaeology.” We observed within our fields a systematic methodological whitewashing of the entire Western European medieval population record. No grave sites, other than our study’s two London sites, have been analyzed to determine the race of those buried. Scholars had assumed everyone was white. Similarly, in medieval legal records, there has been almost no discussion of several court documents that describe the everyday Black lives in medieval England.
Tina Villadolid
2025-26 Artistic Research Fellow
Animist Meets Catholic: Melding of Spirituality in Colonial Philippines
In the late 16th century, a key element of the Spanish conquest of the Philippines was the establishment of Catholic friars in the archipelago. Forbidden to practice their indigenous animist spirituality, people of the Philippines found ways to fuse animism with Catholicism as a creative form of resistance to colonial oppression. Studying the Spanish devotional literature from the 16th and 17th centuries at the Folger Shakespeare Library will deepen my understanding of the tricksterism of Filipino spirituality from that period. These studies will allow me to more fully comprehend how to subvert and reclaim the generational inheritances of these histories through the materiality of my practice.
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 Elise Ansel Reimagines Macbeth
Ansel shares how her questions as an artist fellow about Fuseli’s take on Shakespeare’s Macbeth inspired her to create two abstract, large-scale oil paintings but this time from a woman’s perspective that celebrates the play’s sisterhood.
Anthony Burgess and Shakespeare
You probably know Anthony Burgess as the author of A Clockwork Orange, but did you know he was also a prominent commentator on Shakespeare’s life?
Musicians on ships in Early Modern Europe
A look at the many roles that musicians played aboard Early Modern ships.
“A smale remembrance”: Elizabethan Posy Rings
A closer look at 17th century engraved rings in the Folger’s collection
North Africa Through the Eyes of England
A look at some of the colonial sources that informed the understanding that 17th century English people had of North Africa.