Current and Upcoming Folger Institute Scholarly Programs

Updated August 14, 2024

The Folger Shakespeare Library reopened on Friday, June 21, 2024, after major renovations. Newly refurbished spaces for our Folger researchers are among the improvements, which also include dedicated exhibition galleries, meeting spaces with enhanced audio-visual capabilities, and updated HVAC systems.

The Folger Institute relies on our Consortium university partners to plan, implement, and oversee our Scholarly Programs. In addition to programs held at the newly reopened Folger, we anticipate continuing our recent practice of partnering with Consortium universities to convene scholarly conversations on their campuses. These will take advantage of unique, localized knowledge, underexplored archives, and diverse communities of inquiry and practice. A process to submit proposals is available on Folgerpedia.

Below are the descriptions for the programs on offer during 2024-2025. We have embraced a mix of in-person, hybrid, and fully virtual programming across a wide range of topics, with an eye on reducing or eliminating barriers to inclusion as often as possible. Some programs will offer virtual sessions, with participation available via open registration. Most will require applications from those hoping to participate fully, and the application deadlines are specified below. This ensures that those selected and funded to attend will be strong contributors to the conversation.

As always, participants are encouraged to pursue their individual research interests within a given program’s specific topic. Before submitting an application, applicants should read the description carefully so that they can tailor their statement of research plans to the program in question. Folger Institute Consortium affiliates should consult with their campus representatives to ensure that they make their strongest case for admission. Please visit Apply for Scholarly Programs for further details about the application process.

Additional programs will be added as the year progresses, and these programs, as well as any revisions and adjustments to previously announced ones, will be reflected on this page and promoted through our various channels, including the Folger’s bi-monthly newsletter, the Research Bulletin. Those not yet subscribed may do so here.

If you have any questions about these programs, or the logistics of applying, email us at institute@folger.edu. Please note: program application portals will open one month before the application deadline. 

Yearlong 2024-2025

Directed by Amanda Bailey (University of Maryland) and Ruben Espinosa (Arizona State University)

Public Humanities is an emerging academic discipline concerned with how humanities scholarship can engage broader publics. Through rigorous theoretical and historical readings, this colloquium will explore ideas of the public, consider the state of the humanities, and learn about interventions made by early modern scholars. Rather than seeing literary history in opposition to public engagement, participants will consider the ways academic training can be leveraged to reach diverse audiences, exploit new media platforms, and generate innovative venues for scholarly research. Looking forward and backward in sessions alternating between in person and virtual, the colloquium will use the Folger’s archives to research an array of knowledge-making modes and knowledge communities as participants investigate conditions and spaces where humanistic knowledge has been produced and transmitted in the past. The colloquium will also consider cutting-edge technologies, approaches, and theories that allow scholars to make their own research legible and compelling. In exploring the breadth, depth, and value of the humanities to public life, we will also consider the limits of current models of applied humanities. Advanced graduate students preparing for an academic career as undergraduate education shifts to project-based, collaborative, public-facing learning are invited to apply, as are faculty, at all stages, who are interested in shifts in our profession and discipline. The colloquium will invite guest practitioners and learn about their current projects, including obstacles and best practices. 

Co-directors: Amanda Bailey is ADVANCE Professor and Chair of the Department of English at the University of Maryland.  A scholar of early modern literature and culture, her teaching and research focus on the histories of marginalized peoples and systems of oppression, political and legal thought, and current state of higher education. She is the author of Flaunting: Style and the Subversive Male Body in Renaissance England; Of Bondage: Debt, Property, and Personhood in Early Modern England; and, most recently, Shakespeare on Consent (2023). Her monograph in progress, Democracy with Publics, explores the role of the humanities in the democratization of higher education. Ruben Espinosa is Professor of English at Arizona State University and Director of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. He is the author of Shakespeare on the Shades of Racism (2021), Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England (2011), and co-editor of Shakespeare and Immigration (2014). He is President of the Shakespeare Association of America (2024-2026), and is working on his next monograph, Shakespeare on the Border: Language, Legitimacy and La Frontera.  

Anticipated schedule: Eight Friday mornings, 10 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Eastern, October through June, with three virtual and five in-person sessions at the Folger Shakespeare Library: October 11, November 22, December 13, 2024; January 31, February 28, April 18, May 9, and June 13, 2025. The November, January, and April sessions will be virtual. The in-person June session may be extended to offer a showcase of participant projects. Participant funding for this program is possible through a collaboration with Folger Fellowships. 

Directed by Holly Brewer and Alejandro Cañeque (both University of Maryland)

This colloquium considers the interconnected topics of enslavement, race, and war in the Spanish and English empires. Drawing on the primary sources produced by these and other empires (including African, native American, Portuguese, Dutch, and French), a dozen participants will consider the many points of cultural connection and overlap, violent conflict, and major events and debates, in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Central questions may include: How did imperial struggles affect local wars? How did wars for territory and trade connect to slavery? How did philosophical debates over Indigenous treatment and Christianization, like the Valladolid Debate of 1550–1551, shape later thinking about the justification of enslavement? How does the contest for the early modern Atlantic World connect to larger historical debates about human equality and/or racism that persist to today? The colloquium will be of interest to historians, scholars of comparative literature, and visual studies scholars. Scholars working on histories of empires, enslavement, and war in Africa, Europe, and the Americas will bring crucial perspectives to this monthly program. Visiting faculty will be invited to address specialized topics aligned with the research interests of the admitted participants. 

Directors: Holly Brewer is Burke Professor of American History and Associate Professor at the University of Maryland. Her first book, By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority, traced the origin and impact of “democratical” ideas across the early British empire by examining debates about who can consent in theory and legal practice. A forthcoming monograph, “The Kings’ Slaves: Creating America’s Plantation System,” was supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship. Alejandro Cañeque is Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research focuses on the political and religious cultures of colonial Latin America and the Spanish Empire. He is the author of The King’s Living Image: The Culture and Politics of Viceregal Power in Colonial Mexico and, most recently, Un imperio de mártires. Religión y poder en las fronteras de la Monarquía Hispánica.

Anticipated Schedule: Eight Friday afternoons, 2:00-4:00 p.m. Eastern, October through May, with four virtual and four in-person sessions at the Folger Shakespeare Library: October 4, November 8, December 6, 2024; January 24, February 7, March 7, April 11, and May 9, 2025. The December, February, March, and April sessions will be virtual. 

Co-directed by Herman Bennett (City University of New York) and Jenny Mann (New York University) 

This program focuses on the use of primary materials available for the study of the history, culture, society, and literature of early modern Britain, Europe, and the Atlantic World, broadly conceived. The goal throughout will be to foster interdisciplinary scholarship while considering broad methodological and theoretical problems relevant to current work in early modern studies, especially when working in fields that contain deliberate elisions and silences in their historical archives. Twelve to fourteen participants are welcome to explore the Folger Collections and other DC-area special collections to study a variety of printed and manuscript sources relevant to Ph.D. candidates in history and literature. They will learn (with the support and assistance of Folger librarians and curatorial staff) essential research skills as well as strategies for working with digital resources and remediated rare materials. Preference will be given to applicants who have completed course work and preliminary exams; they should be preparing a prospectus or beginning to draft chapters. Applicants should consult with their dissertation directors before applying to ensure that their work is at a stage that would benefit from the seminar, and their directors should certify that this is the case in their recommendation letters. Those whose dissertations are substantially complete will not be competitive applicants.

Directors: Herman L. Bennett is Professor at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and Director of the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean (IRADAC). Among his monographs are Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570–1640 (2003); Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico (2009); and African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty & Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic (2019). Jenny C. Mann is Professor of English at New York University with a joint appointment with NYU Gallatin. She has followed her first book, Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare’s England (2012), with The Trials of Orpheus: Poetry, Science, and the Early Modern Sublime (2021). Her current research project explores problems of self-reference in utopian literature from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century.

Anticipated Schedule: Six Thursday afternoons, 1 to 4:30 p.m. Eastern, from October through June: October 3, November 7, and December 5, 2024; February 13, April 10, and June 12, 2025. Admitted participants will receive two nights of lodging and are expected to use that Friday to conduct research at the Folger Shakespeare Library and other DC-area collections. The February and April dates will be virtual.

Fall 2024

Organized by Brandi K. Adams (Arizona State University), Claire M. L. Bourne (Pennsylvania State University), Rory Loughnane (University of Kent), and Catherine Richardson (University of Kent)

Textual editing is a vital field of study and practice for early modern studies, one that helps to establish who and what is being read in the classroom and wider community and performed globally. It creates canons, ascribes value, and recovers lost voices. How texts are introduced, edited, and annotated also produces modes of reading and institutes habits of analysis. Textual editing is, however, weighed down by critical tradition and even gatekeeping. This is especially the case in the editing of major early modern authors such as Marlowe or Shakespeare, where any new emendation must engage with a pedantic and often exclusionary history of decision-making. Many working in early modern studies wish to see a more positive, diverse, and inclusive future, and this timely symposium aims to bring together a wide range of practitioners in textual studies and cognate fields to discuss possibilities and identify pathways to make this a reality. Using the past, present, and future editing of the works of Marlowe and Shakespeare to center the symposium’s discussion and analysis, this event will provide a “state of the field” exchange that aims to chart expansive and inclusive futures for editorial practices.

Organizers: Brandi K. Adams is Assistant Professor of English at Arizona State University. Her work appears in journals and essay collections including Shakespeare Quarterly and The Oxford Handbook of the History of the Book in Early Modern England. She is currently editing Merry Wives of Windsor with Jonathan Hope and writing her first monograph entitled Representations of Books and Readers in Early Modern English drama (1580-1640). Claire M. L. Bourne is Associate Professor of English at The Pennsylvania State University. She is author of Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England (2020) and co-author with Jason Scott-Warren of “‘thy unvalued Booke’: John Milton’s Copy of the Shakespeare First Folio” (2022). She is editing 1 Henry the Sixth, for The Arden Shakespeare, Fourth Series, and writing a new editorial history of Shakespeare through the materials and labor of bookwork. Rory Loughnane is Reader in Early Modern Studies at the University of Kent. He is the author or editor of ten books and has published widely on Shakespeare and early modern studies. For the New Oxford Shakespeare, he has edited more than ten of Shakespeare’s plays. He is a Series Editor of Studies in Early Modern Authorship (Routledge) and Shakespeare and Text (Cambridge), and a General Editor of The Revels Plays series (Manchester) and the forthcoming edition of Oxford Marlowe. Catherine Richardson is Pro-Vice-Chancellor Arts and Humanities, at the University of East Anglia. She was formerly Professor of Early Modern Studies and Director of the Institute of Cultural and Creative Industries, University of Kent. She explores early modern material culture on and off stage and the history of the creative industries, most recently in A Day at Home in Early Modern England, with Tara Hamling (Yale), Practices of Ephemera in Early Modern England, edited with Callan Davies and Hannah Lilley (Routledge) Arden of Faversham (Bloomsbury), and the forthcoming edition of Oxford Marlowe.

Invited Presenters: Patricia Akhimie (Folger Institute), Zachary Lesser (University of Pennsylvania), Jeffrey Masten (Northwestern University), and Emma Smith (University of Oxford) will open the symposium with a Thursday evening plenary conversation on the present and future of editing Marlowe and Shakespeare. Over Friday and Saturday, the following presenters will address four respective topics: Miles P. Grier (The City University of New York), M.J. Kidnie (Western University), and Laurie Maguire (University of Oxford) on Philological Futures; Vin Nardizzi (University of British Columbia) and Evelyn Tribble (University of Connecticut) on Interdisciplinary Futures;  Simone Chess (Wayne State University), Misha Teramura (University of Toronto), and Katherine Williams (University of Toronto) on Intersectional Futures; and Laura Estill (St. Francis Xavier University) and Janelle Jenstad (University of Victoria) on Digital Futures. Saturday will also include working groups devoted to exploring the “futures” listed above in which the conveners will invite participants to address the relationship between editing and field-ranging questions about authority, opportunity, and career.  

Anticipated Schedule: Thursday evening through Saturday, October 17-19, 2024, at the Folger Shakespeare Library. 

Spring 2025

Directed by Urvashi Chakravarty (University of Toronto)

This ten-week colloquy for advanced undergraduate students will explore the topic of consent and sovereignty in conversation with the Folger’s 2024­­–2025 theme, “Whose Democracy?”. Twelve to fifteen participants will examine problems of power and authority as they relate to different overlapping spheres of consent, including political, sexual, social, and economic consent. Students will read both early modern and contemporary sources and discuss them with invited guests. Throughout the colloquy, participants will also learn about the Folger’s special collections materials and public-facing resources, speak with curators and practitioners, and conclude the program with an in-person visit to the Folger. In lieu of a seminar paper, participants will individually or collectively undertake a public-facing project (short blog post, podcast, or video) to share their findings and insights, which aligns with efforts at the Folger to communicate scholarly discoveries with wider audiences.

Director: Urvashi Chakravarty, Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto, works on early modern English literature, critical race studies, queer studies, and slavery and servitude in early modern England and the Atlantic world. Author of Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England (Pennsylvania, 2022), which won the Shakespeare Association of America’s First Book Award and the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Prize granted by the Renaissance Society of America, she is currently at work on a second book, tentatively titled Racial Futurity: Family, Slavery, and the Invention of White Womanhood in Early Modernity.

Anticipated schedule: Ten Friday afternoons, virtually, from 2-4 p.m. Eastern, January 31 through April 11, 2025, except for March 21. A final in-person session will be held at the Folger Shakespeare Library during the weeklong celebration of Shakespeare’s Birthday. All admitted participants will receive support to offset their travel and lodging costs.

Apply: November 4, 2024. This program is only open to Folger Institute Consortium affiliates. Applicants need not be humanities majors or focused on the early modern period. They should describe their reasons for wanting to participate in fewer than 250 words in lieu of the three-page statement that the application guidelines require. One brief letter of support is required, and this does not need to be from a tenured faculty member. Those seeking academic credit should make arrangements with their home departments.

Co-directed by Alan H. Nelson (University of California, Berkeley), Lena Orlin (Georgetown University), and Duncan Salkeld (University of Chichester)

The Bridewell Court Minute Books offer windows onto the everyday lives of early modern Londoners—from the destitute to the upper middle-class—who ran afoul of the law for myriad reasons. The Minute Books thus also form an ideal pathway into archival research, recording demographic and other information about early modern Londoners accused of prostitution, adultery, theft, begging, gambling, witchcraft, cross-dressing, and other types of disorder. Typical entries document criminal charges; note the time and place of alleged infractions; provide verbatim interrogations; and record court decisions, including dismissal, whipping, forced work, fines, incarceration, referral to “Bedlam,” or deportation to Virginia. Bethlem Royal Hospital makes the Minute Books available online, open access, in high-resolution digital images. This two-part seminar will share modernized transcriptions of the Court Minute Books from the years 1559 through 1610 and beyond with scholars who wish to explore the administration and functions of Bridewell; put Bridewell in the context of other early modern courts and other institutions, authorities, or bodies that regulated behavior; or consider the intersections between crime, punishment, gender, race, geographical origins, and class. Those with relevant interests are encouraged to apply. 

Co-directors: Alan H. Nelson is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley. His specializations are paleography, bibliography, and the reconstruction of the literary life and times of medieval and Renaissance England from documentary sources. He is a major contributor of essays to the Shakespeare Documented project sponsored by the Folger Shakespeare Library. Lena Cowen Orlin is Emeritus Professor of English at Georgetown University and Fellow of the Hagler Institute for Advanced Study. Her work on London includes Material London, ca. 1600 and Locating Privacy in Tudor London. Her most recent publication is the archival biography, The Private Life of William Shakespeare. Duncan Salkeld is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at the University of Chichester, England. His specializations are Shakespeare and early modern London, textual and authorship studies, and paleography. His book Shakespeare and London draws extensively on the Bridewell records.

Anticipated Schedule: All day Friday and Saturday, February 21-22, and May 23-24, 2025, at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Following February’s extensive introduction to the Court Minute Books, Bridewell’s situation in London, and other areas of interest to participants, the May meeting will be devoted to the sharing of participants’ Bridewell-related research projects. 

Apply: November 4, 2024. Applicants should describe the research project or interests that they hope to develop over the course of spring 2025 with the advice of the co-directors and new colleagues. While facility with English paleography is not required, please note your ability or interest level. 

Directed by Lauren Benton (Yale University) and Andrew Fitzmaurice (Queen Mary University of London)

Sponsored by The Center for Early Modern Political Thought

A wave of recent histories of imperial and interpolity law in the early modern period (c. 1500-1800, but sometimes extending consideration both before and after these dates) has transformed the field. The results include novel insights about sovereignty, subjecthood, rights, and property, as well as new understandings of natural law, the law of nations, and global legal regimes from the perspective of both indigenous actors and Europeans. Methodologically varied and interdisciplinary, the research spotlights a broad cast of legal actors—not just officials and states but also corporations and groups or individuals with fluid notions of legal and political belonging. This innovative scholarship encompasses multiple strands. One corrects the Eurocentrism of histories of the law of nations by investigating the political thought and legal strategies of communities outside Europe. Another reinterprets European political thought, broadly defined, in relation to colonies and empires. And a third analyzes the construction and meanings of the rule of law within empires. These approaches connect small corners of political thought and action to big questions about the role of law in making and remaking empires and order in the early modern world. Faculty and advanced graduate students with research projects related to the above concerns are welcome to apply.

Directors: Lauren Benton is Barton M. Biggs Professor of History and Professor of Law at Yale University. Her most recent book on empire and law is They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence. Previous books include A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400-1900. In 2019, Benton received the Toynbee Prize for significant contributions to global history. Andrew Fitzmaurice, Professor of the History of Political Thought at Queen Mary University of London, focuses upon the ideologies of European empires, especially their justifications for the appropriation of land and sovereignty from non-Europeans from the sixteenth century on. He is the author of Sovereignty, Property, and Empire 1500 – 2000, and, most recently, King Leopold’s Ghostwriter.

Anticipated Schedule: Friday and Saturday, May 2 and 3, 2025.

Apply: March 3, 2025, for admission and grants-in-aid for Folger Institute Consortium affiliates.

Directed by Heather Wolfe (Folger Shakespeare Library)

This weeklong course provides an intensive introduction to handwriting in early modern England, with a particular emphasis on the English secretary hand of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Working from digitized and physical manuscripts, participants will be trained in the accurate reading and transcription of secretary, italic, and mixed hands. The workshop’s focus will include recipe books, personal correspondence, and poetry miscellanies drawn from the Folger collection. Participants will experiment with contemporary writing materials (quills, iron gall ink, and paper); learn the terminology for describing and comparing letterforms; and become skillful decipherers of abbreviations, numbers, and dates. Transcriptions made by participants will become part of the Early Modern Manuscripts Online (EMMO) corpus. 

Director: Heather Wolfe is Consulting Curator of Manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She was formerly Associate Librarian, co-director of the multi-year research project Before ‘Farm to Table’: Early Modern Foodways and Cultures, and principal investigator of Early Modern Manuscripts Online. Author of numerous articles on early modern manuscripts, Dr. Wolfe has edited The Literary Career and Legacy of Elizabeth Cary, 1613–1680 (2007), The Trevelyon Miscellany of 1608: A Facsimile Edition of Folger Shakespeare Library MS V.b.232 (2007), Letterwriting in Renaissance England (2004) (with Alan Stewart), and Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland: Life and Letters (2001). She is currently working on a book on early modern writing paper in England.

Anticipated Schedule: Tuesday through Saturday, May 27-31, 2025, at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Apply: March 3, 2025, for admission and grants-in-aid for Folger Institute Consortium affiliates.

Summer 2025

Directed by Patricia Akhimie, Caroline Duroselle-Melish, Heather Wolfe, and Owen Williams

The best research is based on inquiry and allows for serendipity. A scholar needs to sharpen research questions and search skills simultaneously and with sensitivity to the ways questions and sources affect each other. The available evidence may invite a new thesis, require a revised approach, or even suggest a new field of exploration. This intensive week is not designed to advance participants’ individual research projects. Rather, it aims to cultivate the participants’ curiosity about primary resources by using exercises that engage their research interests. It is offered to help early-stage graduate students develop a set of research-oriented literacies as they explore the Folger Collections in ways that will be useful for navigating other collections. With the guidance of visiting faculty and curatorial staff from the Folger, twelve to fourteen participants will examine bibliographical tools and their logics, hone their early modern book description skills, learn best practices for organizing and working with digital images, and improve their understanding of the cultural and technological histories of texts. Participants will ask reflexive questions about the nature of primary sources, the collections that house them, and the tools whereby one can access them.

Anticipated Schedule: Tuesday through Saturday, August 12-16, 2025, at the Folger Shakespeare Library. 

Apply: March 3, 2025, for admission and grants-in-aid for Folger Institute Consortium affiliates.