Folger Salon with Mark Bland, Zainab Cheema, and Kate Doubler

Dr. Mark Bland is an independent scholar and bibliographer. He is the author of A Guide to Early Printed Books and Manuscripts, and has published extensively on the early London book-trade, as well as the transmission of manuscripts and editorial matters related to the poems and texts of Ben Jonson. He is presently at work on The World of Simon Waterson, Stationer, a multi-generational study of the book-trade and the creation of the market for contemporary literature.

Dr. Zainab Cheema is Assistant Professor of Early World Literature at Florida Gulf Coast University. Her teaching and research focus on contact zones in early globalizations, early modern race studies, translation movements, Anglo-Iberian cultural exchanges in early modern theatre, and contemporary film and television adaptations of medieval and early modern literature. Zainab is a member of the #ShakeRace and #RaceB4Race scholarly communities, as well as the Borderlands Shakespeare Colectiva. Zainab’s work has been supported by fellowships from the Fulbright Scholarship Program, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Newberry Library, and the Huntington Library. She is currently working on her first book monograph supported by a Folger Long Term Fellowship for 2024-2025. 

Kate Doubler earned her PhD in English from Emory University and is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Instruction at the University of South Florida. Her research interests include early modern culture and the history of knowledge. She is currently working on a biography of Delia Salter Bacon, a nineteenth-century American historian and one of the first people to develop a Shakespeare authorship conspiracy theory. This biography explores the relevance of conspiracism to the American intellectual tradition.