Teaching Shakespeare IS Teaching Race

Dr. Deborah Gascon is a National Board Certified teacher who teaches English and Journalism in Columbia, SC. She also taught English in Romania on a Fulbright Teacher Exchange. Deborah is a 2012 Teaching Shakespeare Institute alum and a Folger Summer Academy mentor teacher. Her doctorate in Curriculum and Instruction is from The University of South Carolina; her dissertation is about the teaching of Shakespeare to increase student comprehension, empathy, and awareness of gender and race issues. When she isn’t teaching, she loves to attend her weekly tap dance class, play tennis, travel to new places, and dig in the dirt. Deborah is also a contributor to the upcoming The Folger Guides to Teaching Shakespeare (expected 2024).

Noelle Cammon teaches English at Heritage High School in Menifee, CA.  During her career, she has taught English in both middle and high school and to students from across a broad range of ability levels and cultures.  She was a participant in the 2018 Teaching Shakespeare Institute program and soon after became heavily involved in the work of Folger Education. Ms. Cammon is a contributor to the upcoming The Folger Guides to Teaching Shakespeare (expected 2024).

Director of Education
pobrien@folger.edu
(202) 675-0372

Dr. O’Brien was named the Folger’s director of education in May 2013. A former Folger educator, she established the Library’s education philosophy and the bulk of its programs in the 1980s and led the department until 1994, when she left to become director of education programs for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Concurrent with that appointment and in collaboration with Cambridge University Press and Georgetown University, she launched and published Shakespeare Magazine, a print and online magazine for teachers of Shakespeare.

Of Haitian American descent, Donna Denizé holds a B.A. from Stonehill College and an M.A in Renaissance drama from Howard University, where she was also a student of poet Robert Hayden, while he served as Consultant to the Library of Congress. She has contributed to scholarly books and journals, and she is the author of a chapbook, The Lover’s Voice (1997) and a book, Broken Like Job (2005). She currently Chairs the English Department at St. Albans School for boys, where she teaches Freshman English; a junior/senior elective in Shakespeare, and Crossroads in American Identity, a course she designed years ago and which affords her the opportunity to do what she most enjoys—exploring not only the cultural and inter-textual crossroads of literary works but also their points of human unity.

Director of the Folger Institute

pakhimie@folger.edu

202-675-0346

Amber Phelps teaches in both the International Baccalaureate English Literature HL and AP Literature programs in Baltimore, MD at Baltimore City College. She is an alum of both Teach for America and the Folger Shakespeare Library’s 2012 Teaching Shakespeare Institute.

Hillary Eklund specializes in English Renaissance literature in a transatlantic context and colonial American literature in English and Spanish. She is also interested in critical approaches to food, ecology, and the history of the book. Prof. Eklund is the author of Literature and Moral Economy in the Early Modern Atlantic: Elegant Sufficiencies (Routledge, 2015), editor of Ground-Work: English Renaissance Literature and Soil Science (Penn State University Press, 2017), and co-editor, with Wendy Beth Hyman, of Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now (Edinburgh University Press, 2019). Her current book project describes how wetlands, often perceived as nature’s “mistakes,” both compel and elude human designs, demonstrating a series of “unfast” countermoves to the fast violence of colonial incursion and technological imposition, and to the slow violence of ecological manipulation and resource expropriation. In the English department, Prof. Eklund teaches courses on Shakespeare, Renaissance literature, literature and environment, early American literature, and writing. She is also involved in Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the Program in the Environment.

Kyle Grady is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Irvine, CA. Kyle is a resident scholar at the Folger’s Teaching Shakespeare Institute, and is currently working on a book project, Mixed Race Moors.

Corey Ahearn is an English Teacher at Northwood High School in Silver Spring, MD. He is the creator and teacher of the Shakespeare and Race elective at his public high school.

Margo Hendricks is professor emerita of literature at UC Santa Cruz. She is the co-editor of Women, ‘Race,’ and Writing in the Early Modern Period, with Patricia Parker (Routledge, 1993) and the author of many journal articles. Her current works in progress are an academic memoir and Heliodorus’ Daughters: Black Women and the Romance Industry. She writes romance fiction as Elysabeth Grace.