Undergraduate Teaching Resources
Tools for teaching, planning, and enhancing the undergraduate classroom
Early Modern Critical Race
Racial injustice has been and continues to be systemic and damaging. Today, scholars of premodern critical race studies are offering new insights into the prehistory of modern racialized thinking and racism. These selected resources provide a starting point for innovative teaching agendas with the goal of creating a more just and inclusive academy, classroom, and society.
Cultivating an Anti-Racist Pedagogy
In this “Critical Race Conversation,” Dr. Ambereen Dadabhoy and Dr. Nedda Mehdizadeh discuss methods of manifesting solidarity through pedagogical practice and demonstrate successful approaches to engaging in meaningful, ongoing discussions with their students about race.
Reading, Writing, and Teaching Black Life and Anti-Black Violence in the Early Modern World
How do students respond when Black life is centered in the study of the early modern world? In this “Critical Race Conversation,” Dr. Jessica Marie Johnson and Dr. Cécile Fromont offer their strategies for having these challenging discussions in the college classroom.
Race and Periodization
Listen to the opening remarks of this symposium held at the Folger as part of the #RaceB4Race initiative, which launched in January 2019 at Arizona State University.
Othello Was My Grandfather: Shakespeare in the African Diaspora
This powerful “Shakespeare’s Birthday Lecture” from Dr. Kim F. Hall on Afrodiasporic appropriations of Othello is available as both audio recording and transcript.
Early Modern Foodways
Early modern food calls to us from across a vast historical gap. How do we interpret food’s meanings and effects, then and now? The multi-disciplinary field of food studies makes an ideal topic of study for the undergraduate classroom!
Interactive Foodways
In the early modern British world, food took circuitous, diverse, and sometimes troubling pathways. Use these interactive modules from the Before ‘Farm to Table’ project to visualize the twists and turns of early modern foodways.
We Are What You Eat
Dr. Gitanjali Shahani and Dr. Jennifer Park explore the ways in which food studies, critical race studies, and early modern studies inform and enrich each other. Add this recorded session from “Critical Race Conversations” to your syllabus!
Recipe Books
The Folger hosts one of the largest collections of early modern recipe books in the world. This full list of the Folger’s early modern English manuscript recipe books features text searchable images and transcriptions available as plain text documents and as PDF reading copies.
Recipe Adaptations
Want your students to try their hand at cooking an early modern dish? These recipes offer a sense of the past for the modern kitchen.
Cooking by the Book
This recorded public program was part of the fall 2020 virtual conference “Food and the Book: 1300-1800.” Learn how Michael Twitty, Tamar E. Adler, Paul Fehribach, and Irina Dumitrescu celebrate the history behind the foods we love.
Selections from Shakespeare & Beyond
Browse this ever-growing archive of blog posts on early modern foodways and recipes written by the Folger’s Before ‘Farm to Table’ team and contributors.
Book History
These resources help students understand how books were created, used, and interpreted in the early modern period, as well as how they are conserved and studied today.
DIY First Folio
Learn how Shakespeare’s First Folio was made by inviting your students to enter the Virtual Printing House! Students can practice making a virtual First Folio (or quarto) through interactive exercises as they learn about early modern printing practices.
Project Dustbunny
In 2019, the Folger partnered with the NIH’s National Human Genome Research Institute to see what could be learned from the dust in a 17th-century book. Use this interview to introduce students to a fascinating intersection of science and book history!
Selections from The Collation
Browse the Folger’s research blog for informative posts from experts on everything from paper, signature marks, unopened books, and book furniture to the difference between woodcuts, engravings and etchings.
Inside the Folger Conservation Lab
Take a tour of the Folger’s Conservation Lab to learn more about conserving rare books and preparing them for digitization and display.
Watermarks
What do cardinal’s hats, unicorns, and grapes have in common? They are all digitized watermarks from the Folger collections! Use this finding aid to introduce your students to 16th- and 17th-century manuscripts and printed books, broadsides, and pamphlets, grouped according to watermark type.
Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama
The Folger Shakespeare Library holds 82 copies of the First Folio, by far the largest single collection and more than a third of the 235 known copies in the world today. From this remarkable collection, the Folger has developed a range of tools for teaching about Shakespeare, his works, and the wider world of early modern drama.
Early Modern English Drama (EMED)
Introduce your students to the bustling scene of the other plays from Shakespeare’s time! Search for full-text plays by genre, company, and theater, and explore our page of teaching resources.
Image Collections
Digitized images from the Folger collections are grouped together for each of Shakespeare’s plays. Easily browse and download images in multiple resolutions to use in your teaching!
The Folger Method
The Folger Method is about the sparks that fly when students engage directly with great texts and questions. Learn more about our principles and practices for teaching Shakespeare and other complex texts.
Folger Shakespeare Editions
Read and download the full texts of Shakespeare’s plays, poems, and sonnets for free online. Use these texts both on-screen in the classroom and as assigned reading!
Shakespeare's Birthday Lectures
Every year, in commemoration of William Shakespeare’s birthday, the Folger invites a scholar to speak about Shakespeare and the early modern world. Many of these lectures have been recorded for easy use in the classroom and on the syllabus!
Shakespeare Documented
Bring your students closer to Shakespeare with the largest and most authoritative collection of primary-source materials from institutions around the world that document the life of William Shakespeare.
General Resources
Follow us online @FolgerResearch and @FolgerED