Folger Salon with Maria Cannon, Amy Cooper, and Carrington OBrion

Maria Cannon is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Portsmouth. Her research interests are family, gender, emotions, and the life cycle in early modern England. She recently co-edited a collection Adulthood in Britain and the United States from 1350 to Generation Z with Laura Tisdall (Newcastle University), and has published articles in Continuity and Change and Genealogy. Her current project Blending the Family: Affection, Obligation and Dynasty in Early Modern English Stepfamilies explores emotion and authority in blended families. She is a convener of the Life Cycles seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, London and a committee member of the Children’s History Society.

Amy Cooper (she/her) is an Associate Professor of English at the U.S. Air Force Academy, where she teaches Renaissance poetry, drama, and history of science. Her essays have been published in ELH, Studies in Philology, edited collections with Palgrave and Bloomsbury, and recently the Folger’s Collation. Her current book project, “Speaking Pictures: from Aesthesis to Aesthetics” traces how the study of aesthesis, “sensory perception,” evolved into Aesthetics, the philosophical study of art now primarily associated with Kant’s Critique of Judgment.

L. Carrington OBrion is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Virginia. Her research focuses on race, culture and performance in the nineteenth-century United States. She studies the ways that Americans used performance to understand the shifting ground of race and citizenship in the Civil War era. Her current work investigates the trajectory of segregation in the nineteenth century theatres. At the Folger, she is exploring the many early American playbills which tell the story of diverse audiences from slavery to freedom. Carrington holds a B.A. in American Studies from Wellesley College and an MPhil in American History from the University of Cambridge.