Owen Williams

Photo Credit: Yassine El Mansouri

Owen Williams joined the Folger Institute in 1999 in the midst of writing his dissertation on Elizabethan law and religion in the English department at the University of Pennsylvania (he eventually finished). As the Institute's Associate Director for Scholarly Programs, he welcomes some two hundred faculty and advanced graduate students to the seminars, symposia, workshops, and conferences that the Institute plans and offers each year. On behalf of the Folger Institute's Consortium Executive Committee, Dr. Williams convenes the application review subcommittee, sits on the program planning subcommittee, and serves as liaison to the faculty representatives from over forty consortium universities. He is an ex officio member of the Steering Committee for the Center for Early Modern Political Thought. From 2013-1016, he served as Administrative Project Director for the three-part NEH Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities, Early Modern Digital Agendas, and is a member of the Folgerpedia content team. He serves as the first Secretary of the Renaissance Society of America. Follow him on twitter: @owilliamsdc

Dr. Williams holds the A.B. in Classics, Greek, from Stanford University, the M.A. in English Literature from the University of Tulsa, and the Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania. In 2016, he completed the M.S. (Ed.) in Instructional Systems and Learning Technologies (ISLT) with a focus on Open and Distance Learning at Florida State University. Editor of Foliomania! Stories Behind Shakespeare’s Most Important Book (2011, reissued 2015), he also co-edited Early Modern Histories of Time: The Periodizations of Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England, with Kristen Poole for the University of Pennsylvania Press (2019). His scholarly interests concern late-Elizabethan religious separatists and the criminalization of religious thought, and, for something completely different, early modern angling techniques.