Folger Salon with Henry Carges, Paul Menzer, and Jennifer Row

Incapable of their Own Distress: Gender, Representation, and Grief in Early Modern England
2026-27 Folger Institute Fellow

My project studies gender, personal emotion, and collective understanding through the representational practice of grief in early modern English literature. I argue that gendered grief was central to the fracturing of collective understanding in the period, as national traumas undermined extant processes for making personal experiences communally legible. Amidst changing mourning rituals and political instability, gender increasingly determined which griefs could be consoled by translating them outwards to the collective and which remained private and illegible. My fellowship will support research for a chapter on Lady Anne Waller’s “Spiritual Journal” (1646-61). Waller uses blank space in her manuscript in an unusual way: to represent the “unknown mercies” she receives that relieve her grief. I will study these blanks alongside similar typographical features in contemporary books to explore how inexpressibility could represent intense feelings of grief in text beyond linguistic forms.

Shakespeare’s Enemies
2026-27 Folger Chair in Shakespeare Studies

Paul Menzer is Professor and Executive Director of Shakespeare and Performance at Mary Baldwin University. He is the author and editor of numerous books, including The Hamlets: Cues, Q’s, and Remembered Texts, Anecdotal Shakespeare, Shakespeare in the Theatre: The American Shakespeare Center, Shakespeare without Print, The Brief Life of William Shakespeare, and The Complete Life of William Shakespeare, as well as editions of Romeo and Juliet and Doctor Faustus. A past President of the Marlowe Society of America and member of the editorial board of Shakespeare Quarterly, Menzer’s work explores how Shakespeare has been performed, remembered, adapted, and mythologized across time. He is also a practicing playwright whose works have appeared at the Blackfriars Playhouse and elsewhere. His current project is Shakespeare’s Enemies, which examines the writers, critics, reformers, and iconoclasts who opposed Shakespeare across the last four centuries.

The Body Perfect: the Aesthetic of Ableism and Race in the Early Modern Francosphere
2026-27 Folger Institute Long-term Fellow

Jennifer Row is an associate professor at the University of Minnesota, where she researches and teaches in critical disability studies, queer theory, early modern theater and dance, and affect theory. Queer Velocities: Time, Sex and Biopower on the Early Modern Stage (Northwestern UP 2022), examines the affects of speeds and slownesses of queer erotics onstage in relation to seventeenth century theater’s power to govern the time of life. Her second monograph in progress, The Body Perfect: the Aesthetics of Ableism and Race in the Early Francophone World argues that aesthetic practices (from dance manuals to architecture to fairy tales) shaped the differences between valuable and disposable bodies, and explores how these disciplining forces reverberated across race, gender and sexuality in the early modern French and Francophone world.

This research was supported by McKnight Land-Grant Professorship and the Solmsen Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison