Booking and details
Dates 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
How to Conjure Demons Using the Holdings at the Folger Shakespeare Library: A Primer
Artificial Intelligence, 1588
Brandi K. Adams explores how concerns about “artificiall intelligence” manifest in the 16th and 17th centuries, reflecting the concerns of our own time.
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.