Booking and details
Dates Thu, Oct 16, 2025 at 4:30pm
Venue Great Hall
Tickets Free; no ticket required
Critical Indigenous Studies. Black experience in the Dominican Republic. The Salem Witch Trials in contemporary imagination.
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
Jamie Paris
2025-26 Short-term Fellow
Towards Indigenous Shakespeares
This project used methods from Critical Indigenous Studies to read the representations of land, relationally, and gender in early modern travel literature and drama. The project, moreover, will look at Indigenous authors from Turtle Island who are writing back to Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
Ruth Pión
2025-26 Artistic Research Fellow
HISTORICAL MAROONAGE: Decolonizing space, memory, and heritage
Historical Maroonage addresses the silencing of the Black experience in the Dominican Republic, where Eurocentrism and racism plague spaces of memory and the historical narratives that inform them. Through a publicly engaged approach the project seeks to ensure that the voices of marginalized communities are heard and that their history is incorporated into the narrative fabric of the country and the region. This digital and public humanities project aims to amplify AfrohistoriaRD’s liberatory practice, which disrupts dominant narratives, investigates silenced histories, encourages critical thinking, and fosters imagination by creating new ways to examine our past.
Evelyn Reidy
2025-26 Artistic Research Fellow
More Weight, or, I Saw Goody Proctor at the Gift Shop: A new play
The infamous court proceedings and subsequent executions of 1692-1623 in Salem, Massachusetts—colloquially known as the Salem Witch Trials—have long captured the public imagination in the United States and beyond. The oft sensationalized and frequently misunderstood events have inspired a significant canon of literary and dramatic works, not to mention a tourism industry that, for better or worse, buoys modern-day Salem’s economy. In a sea of books, plays, museums, scare attractions, kitschy waxworks, and “haunted Salem” tours, it is easy to lose sight of the stories of the twenty-five people who died—either by disease or execution—out of the over two hundred accused during a series of trials that tore a community apart and exposed many of the ugly prejudices that undergirded the American colonial project.
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
Miscellaneous Race
Looking at enslaved Black workers and the 1588 Spanish Armada’s afterlives in a 17th-century English miscellany
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