Booking and details
Reserve Your SpotDates Fri, Jan 8, 2027, at 12pm ET
Venue Virtual on Zoom
Tickets Free, registration required
Reclaiming South Asian and Middle Eastern material culture through embodied storytelling. Early modern visualizations of the womb. Bodies, images, rituals, and archives as carriers of cultural memory.
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.
Speakers
SEVAN
The Weight of a Fig
2026-27 Folger Institute Artistic Research Fellow
I am currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre & Dance at Amherst College, but am based out of NYC working as a performer-writer. I’m spending my fellowship time working on a new piece titled: The Weight of a Fig, a performance project exploring how early modern English texts used South Asian and Middle Eastern objects, such as figs, spices, silks, and jewels, to signify excess, danger, sensuality, and exoticism. I am hoping to create an immersive promenade-theatre piece that reclaims these objects through diasporic memory, cultural critique, and embodied storytelling.
I’m a refugee immigrant from the Middle East whose outside interests include everything from gaming and comics to nature trails and cooking far too much for social occasions.
Madyha Leghari
Possible Wombs
2026-27 Folger Institute Artistic Research Fellow
Madyha Leghari is a visual artist whose practice explores the instability of language and the body. At the Folger, she will investigate how early modern visualizations of the womb shaped ideas of life, personhood, and maternal agency. Drawing on historical anatomical diagrams, she will create drawings and ceramic sculptures that reimagine anatomy through speculative organs and wombs that are multispecies, symbiotic, autonomous, or metaphorical. She is also appropriating scientific labeling systems as frameworks for poetic inscription. The project places historical research in dialogue with contemporary debates around reproductive futures, bodily autonomy, and the politics of fetal and maternal life. Leghari has been the recipient of the Fulbright Scholarship, Nicholson Studio Residency, VisArts Bresler Residency, Wherewithal Research Grant, Hamiltonian Artists Fellowship, Mansion Artist Residency, Delta Research Placement at Flat Time House, and Siena Art Institute Artist Residency.
Valkyrie Yao
Monstrous and Sacred Bodies: Imagining the East in Early Modern Europe
2026-27 Folger Institute Artistic Research Fellow
Valkyrie Yao is an artist, researcher, educator, and founder of ELSEHERE International Arts Nexus. Working across performance, moving image, installation, and critical writing, her practice examines how bodies, images, rituals, and archival traces carry cultural memory across time, language, and geography. Her research brings performance studies into dialogue with ritual studies, Chinese aesthetic-philosophical thought, Buddhist and Daoist cosmologies, and contemporary media culture. It examines how masked bodies, repeated gestures, threshold actions, devotional forms, and image-based spectatorship produce systems of perception, transmission, and historical interpretation. Her work has been supported by the Folger Institute Artistic Research Fellowship, the LMCC Manhattan Arts Creative Engagement Grant, The Laundromat Project Create Change Fellowship, and international presentations in performance, film, and interdisciplinary arts.
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.
Animal Magnetism: Absorption and Attraction in Early Modern Recipes
Fellow Madeleine Sheahan looks at early modern medical recipes that use an ingredient that can’t help but seem gruesome to modern readers: puppies.
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.