Booking and details
Reserve Your SpotDates Fri, Dec 5, 2025, at 12pm
Venue Virtual on Zoom
Tickets Free, registration required
Melancholy in the 18th century. Books of Hours. Teaching drama in the community college classroom.
Interested? Join us for the next Virtual Folger Salon.
About Folger Salon
Learn about research happening at the Folger in real time! Each month, Folger Institute scholar and artist fellows share their most exciting finds and thought-provoking challenges, followed by Q&A. Most Folger Salons take place in-person in the Great Hall at the Folger Shakespeare Library, but occasionally these events are held virtually to showcase the work of the Folger’s Virtual Fellows.
This is a free event, with registration required.
Speakers
Andres Gattinoni
2025-26 Short-term Fellow
The English Malady Abroad: Emotions and Translations of Melancholy in Continental Europe in the Long 18th Century (1660-1800)
My project aims to analyze the circulation, reception, and translation of concepts related to melancholy between Britain, France, Spain, and Italy in the long 18th century. I’m particularly interested in ‘untranslatable’ concepts and what they can tell us about the communicability of experience.
Margherita Malerba
2025-26 Artistic Research Fellow
Il libro d’ore – The Book of Hours
Layla Zeitouni
2025-26 Short-term Fellow
Teaching Drama as Drama: The Challenge of Reinventing Theatre to Increase Cultural and Social Capital of Low-Income Students of Color at Urban Community Colleges
This project traces the shift to teaching drama as literature in the English classroom, specifically within the context of community college student outcomes, to determine how to increase students’ cultural capital through theater. Students at Boston community colleges have little institutional exposure to theater, an activity that statistically draws a white, high-income crowd and does not offer space or interest for students whose past exposure to theater was high school Common Core Shakespeare. Instead, finding a solution that allows English faculty to increase the presence of drama at schools directly increases cultural capital, indirectly increasing social capital in a city fraught with historic inequities that still challenge student successes today.
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