Folger Salon with Austin Anderson, Joaquín Molina, and Alice Wickenden

Racial Recursivity: A Methodology for Critical Race Game Studies
2026-27 Folger Institute Fellow

Austin Anderson Ph.D is a Provostial Fellow at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Critical Game Studies Lab. He studies how games are enmeshed with race, gender, identity, and class while also examining the liberatory potentials of gameworlds. His first book project, Racial Recursivity: A Methodology for Critical Race Game Studies, creates a formalist ludic-textual framework for reading videogames as racial-cultural projects by exploring the role of repetition in racial practices and games. At the Folger, he will be working through references to Shakespeare in Bethesda’s videogames and looking at how these references are mediated by racial considerations.

Transatlantic Choreographies of the Carved Gourd: Influence, and Material Culture in the Early Andean (New) World
2026-27 Folger Institute Fellow

Originally from Chile, Joaquín Molina is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology of the Americas at the University of Bonn, Germany. He holds an M.A. in Art Theory and History and a B.A. in Hispanic Language and Literature, both from the University of Chile. His research interests include the biographies of objects and their transcontinental diaspora, Andean ontology, and the analysis of Indigenous aesthtical phenomena.

Provenance: Early Modern Books and their Afterlives
2026-27 Folger Institute Fellow

I am a book historian and literary scholar, primarily of the early modern period. My current work is interested in the concept of provenance and how it affects collections of early modern books. I ask how libraries understand their own legacies, how they work to produce new forms of knowledge, and how this might allow us to interrogate our own digital, pedagogical, and institutional engagements with rare books. I am particularly interested in what it means for institutions to own and use books that have ‘difficult’ provenances, and what it means for these owner’s names to be perpetuated through library infrastructures; at the Folger, I will be looking at the entanglements between Henry Folger’s oil work and his library’s legacy.