Booking and details
Dates Thu, Sep 24, 2026 at 4:30pm
Venue Great Hall
Tickets Free; no ticket required
Visual depictions of 18th-century actresses. Food pickling as preservation, longevity, and endurance. Household recipes from early modern England.
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 café, Quill & Crumb.
This is a free event. Seating is limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis.
Speakers
Anne-Claire Michoux
Displays of Sensibility: Undomesticated Women of the Theatre, 1750-1830
2026-27 Folger Institute Fellow
Anne-Claire Michoux is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich, specialising in British and Irish literature of the long eighteenth century. Her research interests include eighteenth-century and Romantic women’s writing, the novel, theatrical culture, performance history as well as contemporary Irish fiction. Her current project examines the representations of eighteenth-century actresses held in the Babette Craven Theatrical Memorabilia Collection. It considers how the visual depictions of eighteenth-century female performers, in engravings, statues, busts, porcelain figurines, cameos, watch-paper, and tea caddies, challenged contemporary discourses on femininity and female propriety, as objects entered the home and became a topic of conversation. It is part of a larger project that explores how women’s voices were represented, regulated, and staged in eighteenth-century theatrical culture.
Jagrut Raval
Indian Pickle: V.a.680
2026-27 Folger Institute Artistic Research Fellow
Jagrut Raval is a visual artist and researcher based in Hamburg, Germany. His work explores gaps between history, mythology, museum collections, and colonial archives, with a particular interest in speculative storytelling. His practice spans installation, photography, lecture performance, drawing, and digital archives.
His research develops a storyworld around Narad, an itinerant polymath, and Soltan Gjin Achmet, whose presence in eighteenth-century Americas and Europe appears through archival traces. Jagrut uses fragments, mistranslations, and missing records as material for visual and narrative works. This forms the basis of his project The Story of Somafal, which began through research and performances at Museum am Rothenbaum (MARKK), Hamburg. His work has been supported by the Hamburg Ministry of Culture and Media. He studied Photography at Savannah College of Art and Design, USA; Expanded Media at Hochschule Darmstadt, Germany; and Interior Architecture at CEPT University, India.
Mads Sheahan
Recipes for Life and Death in the Seventeenth-Century English Household
2026-27 Folger Institute Fellow
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
Roguery and Redemption in 'Stanleyes Remedy' (1646)
The cautionary tale of this English Civil War-era pamphlet follows a respectable barrister’s descent into a life of crime and his ultimate redemption through repentance, a narrative shaped by the political imperatives of the time.
Re-writing and Reimagining Early Modern Witchcraft Through Creative Practice
Artistic Research Fellow Evelyn Reidy shares how she is using the Folger’s collection material related to witchcraft, early modern beliefs, and women’s knowledge to help her portray the women executed in Salem in 1692-93 in her new play, More Weight, or I Saw Goody Proctor at the Gift Shop.
The one (fem.)
Artistic Research Fellow Billy Morgan shares and contextualizes an excerpt of a fiction piece shaped by their work at the Folger.
Drafting Narratives: Weaving, Sequence, and Story in the Folger Library Archive
Artistic Research Fellow, Kate Nartker, transforms weave drafts from one of our recipe books into cloth and film.
The Untold History of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe
In his groundbreaking documentary, We Were Here, Folger Fellow Fred Kuwornu shares the diverse African presence in Renaissance Europe—princes, ambassadors, saints, artists, scholars, and knights—all revealed through art from the period.