2021-2022 Folger Institute Scholarly Programs

This article lists the scholarly programming of the Folger Institute for the 2021-2022 academic year. For more past programming, please see the article Folger Institute scholarly programs archive.

Researching and Writing the Early Modern Dissertation

Dissertation Seminar

Joyce Chaplin, Julie Crawford, and Jenny C. Mann

This program focused 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. Participants visited rare materials collections in the spring to explore a variety of printed and manuscript sources relevant to Ph.D. candidates in history and literature, and they learned (with the assistance of staff at the host university libraries) essential research skills as well as strategies for working with digital resources and remediated rare materials. The goal throughout was 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.

Directors: Joyce E. Chaplin is the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University. A former Fulbright Scholar and Guggenheim Fellow, she has published five monographs, one co-authored book, and two Norton Critical Editions. She did research for her second book, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500–1676 (2001), at the Folger. Julie Crawford is the Mark van Doren Professor of Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is the author of Marvelous Protestantism (2004), Mediatrix (2014), and numerous essays on authors ranging from Shakespeare to Anne Clifford and on topics ranging from the history of reading to the history of sexuality. In 2016 she taught a Folger Seminar on Cavendish and Hutchinson, and she is currently completing a book manuscript entitled “Margaret Cavendish’s Political Career." Jenny C. Mann is an Associate 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 new research project explores problems of self-reference in utopian literature from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century.

Region and Enmity: A RaceB4Race Symposium (virtual symposium)

Patricia Akhimie, Ana Laguna, Mayte Green-Mercado, Sylvester Cruz, and Henry Turner

Co-sponsored by Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey; the Folger Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library; and the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Arizona State University

Enmity is a sustaining force for systemic racism, a fervent antipathy toward a category of people. Enmity exists at the nexus of individual and group identity and produces difference by desiring opposition and supremacy, imagining separation by force, and willing conflict. Enmity unfolds in different ways in different places, according to local logics of territory, population, language, or culture, even as these geographical divisions are subject to constant change. This interdisciplinary symposium at Rutgers University focused on how premodern racial discourses are tied to cartographical markers and ambitions. The notions of enmity and region provide a dual dynamic lens for tracing the premodern racial repertoires that developed in response to increasingly hostile contention between cultural and political forces. The symposium invited scholars to take up this intersection between region and enmity and to examine how belief in difference, or the emergence of polarizing structures and violent practices, configured race thinking and racial practices in ways that are both unique to different territories and that transcend them.

Organizers: Patricia Akhimie is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark, where she teaches Shakespeare, Renaissance drama, and early modern women’s travel writing. Sylvester Cruz is a doctoral student in the English department at Rutgers University-New Brunswick and the graduate student coordinator of the Race and the Early Modern World Research Seminar. Mayte Green-Mercado is Assistant Professor of History at Rutgers University-Newark, where she teaches Islamic, Mediterranean, and Iberian history, and directs the Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies minor. Ana Laguna teaches Cervantes as an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Rutgers University-Camden and is co-convenor of the “Race and the Early Modern World” Research Seminar. Henry S. Turner is Professor of English and Vice President for Academic Initiatives at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.