2020-2021 Folger Institute Scholarly Programs: Difference between revisions

(Created page with "2019-2020 Institute Scholarly Programs Below are the descriptions for the programs on offer during the 2019-2020 academic year. Program formats vary, but each program is orien...")
 
No edit summary
 
(4 intermediate revisions by 2 users not shown)
Line 1: Line 1:
2019-2020 Institute Scholarly Programs
This article lists the scholarly programming of the [[Folger Institute]] for the 2020–2021 academic year, which underwent significant changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic. For more past programming, please see the article [[Folger Institute scholarly programs archive]].
Below are the descriptions for the programs on offer during the 2019-2020 academic year. Program formats vary, but each program is oriented around a specific topic or scholarly approach. Participants are encouraged to pursue their individual research interests within that topic.


Before you submit an application, please read the description carefully so that you can tailor your statement of research plans to that description. If you have any questions about these programs, or how to apply, email institute@folger.edu.


Application deadlines are specific to each program and are listed beneath its description. The application portal opens approximately one month before the deadline. Please visit our application information page for further details about the application process.
'''[[Researching the Archive (seminar)|Researching the Archive]]'''


Teaching Paleography (2019 Intensive Summer Workshop)
:'''Joyce E. Chaplin''' and '''Julie Crawford'''
Race and Periodization  (2019 Conference)
The Languages of Nature: Science, Literature, and the Imagination (2019 Fall Workshop)
Political Personhood in the Early Modern British World before 1800 (2019 Fall Symposium)
Researching the Archive (2019-2020 Yearlong Dissertation Seminar)
Rethinking Lyric Histories (2019 Fall Semester Seminar)
Book Theory (2019 Weekend Seminar)
Intersecting the Sexual: Modes of Early Modern Embodiment (2019 Fall Symposium)
Eating through the Archives: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Early Modern Foodways (2019 Fall Graduate Student Workshop)
The Visual Art of Grammar: Iconographies of Language from Europe to the Americas (2019 Weekend Seminar at Brown University)
Early Modern Iroquoia (2020 Spring Semester Seminar at Syracuse University)
Reimagining Andrew Marvell: The Poet at 400 (2020 Spring Weekend Colloquium at the Universtiy of St Andrews)
An Orientation to Research Methods and Agendas (2020 Summer Intensive Skills Course at Pennsylvania State University)
Making Meaning: Hands-on Basic Paleography and Book Production (2020 Summer Intensive Skills Course at Texas A&M University)


Teaching Paleography
:Dissertation Seminar
Heather Wolfe
Intensive Summer Workshop


This three-day workshop explores strategies for teaching paleography at the graduate or advanced undergraduate level. It aims to provide participants with the skills and resources to teach the English secretary hand, whether as a directed study, a single-session practicum in a topical seminar, or a semester-length skills course. It builds on Dr. Wolfe’s Folger Institute skills course, Introduction to Early Modern English Paleography, and her series of Mellon-funded monthlong Summer Institutes. Participants will discuss the challenges they face due to limited manuscript resources on their own campuses and how one extends resources through digital facsimiles. Drawing from digitized materials held at the Folger, they will compile a set of paleographical exercises and pedagogical methods for teaching paleography at their home institutions. Applicants need not have had experience in teaching paleography, but proficiency in reading secretary hand is required and should be addressed in the application materials.
: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. During the virtual sessions, participants explored a variety of printed and manuscript sources relevant to both English and History Ph.D. candidates. The goal throughout will be to foster interdisciplinary scholarship while considering broad methodological and theoretical problems relevant to current work in early modern studies. Preference will be given to applicants who have completed course work and preliminary exams; they should be preparing a prospectus or beginning to write chapters and be ready to make significant use of archival and special collections as part of their visits. 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.


Director: Heather Wolfe is Curator of Manuscripts and Associate Librarian of Audience Development at the Folger Shakespeare Library, 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, she 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). Her current research explores the social circulation of writing paper and blank books and Shakespeare’s coat of arms.  
:'''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."


Schedule: Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, 27 – 29 August 2019.


Apply: 10 June 2019 for admission and grants-in-aid. Mellon Foundation support extends eligibility to all North American scholars.
'''[[Food and the Book: 1300-1800]]'''


:Organized by '''David B. Goldstein''', '''Allen James Grieco''', and''' Sarah Peters Kernan'''


Race and Periodization
:Virtual Conference at the Newberry Library
Fall Conference


Co-sponsored with the Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies
:Co-sponsored by the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library and the Folger Institute’s collaborative research project, ''Before ‘Farm to Table’: Early Modern Foodways and Cultures'', a Mellon Foundation initiative at the Folger Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library


Following upon the inaugural Race Before Race event, a collaboration of medievalists and early modernists held at Arizona State University in January 2019, this conference will foreground the relationship between race and historical periodization. Medievalists and early modernists have long grappled with the meaning and use of their own historical period designations as well as the strictures of periodization itself. This event seeks to explore how critical race theory can enable new insights about, approaches to, and critiques of periodization. Critical race theory situated in both historical and contemporary disciplines necessarily challenges assumptions about historical knowledge, theoretical borders, and scholarly dissemination and impact. This theoretical complex thus holds exciting potential to revolutionize the very terms of academic periodization in medieval and early modern studies. Setting this conference at the Folger Institute and building upon its recent focus on early modern race studies, the conference invites scholars of history, literature, and other disciplines to consider the intersection of critical race studies and historical periodization in terms of the theoretical, methodological, archival, activist, pedagogical, professional, temporal, and spatial implications.
:The growing, preparation, tasting, and eating of food are bodily phenomena. To gain access to them through the distances of history, we must turn to words and images. This interdisciplinary conference examined the book as a primary intersection for foodways throughout the early modern world. The language and imagery of food emerge in all manner of books, including recipe manuscripts, literature, historical documents, religious writings, medical treatises, and engravings, not to mention in marginal stains and other chance material encounters. The convened speakers explored how food interacts with books as physical objects as well as mental ones. They examined books as ways of studying food and its representations in historical perspective, especially those of marginalized and underprivileged people; and as instances of metaphorical food and sustenance in themselves. The conference also hosted collaborations between scholars, food writers, and chefs, resulting in cooking experiments and discussions of current food issues that helped reinvigorate questions about early modern cuisine for a contemporary world.


Update: Listen to opening lectures from the conference
:'''Organizers''': '''David B. Goldstein''' is a co-director of the Before Farm to Table project and Associate Professor of English at York University in Toronto. His publications include ''Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare’s England ''(2013), which shared the Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award, and two co-edited essay collections—''Culinary Shakespeare'' (with Amy Tigner, 2016) and ''Shakespeare and Hospitality ''(with Julia Reinhard Lupton, 2016). '''Allen J. Grieco''' is Senior Research Associate Emeritus at Villa I Tatti (The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies). He has published extensively on the cultural history of food in Italy from the 14th to the 16th centuries including a recent volume on ''Food, Social Politics and the Order of the World in Renaissance Italy'' (2019). He is both co-editor in chief of the journal ''Food & History ''(Brepols) and Series Editor of ''Food Culture, Food History (13th-19thcenturies) ''(Amsterdam University Press). '''Sarah Peters Kernan '''PhD is an independent culinary historian based in Chicago. Her research focuses on cookbooks and culinary activity in medieval and early modern England. She is an editor of ''The Recipes Project'' and a Corresponding Member of the journal ''Food & History''. She regularly collaborates with The Newberry Library on teaching and digital learning projects and has also worked with organizations including The Met Cloisters and the Culinary Historians of Chicago.


Organizer: Ayanna Thompson is Director of the Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies at Arizona State University. Her recent books include, Shakespeare in the Theatre: Peter Sellars (2018), Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose (2016), and Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America (2011). She is editing a collection for Cambridge University Press on Shakespeare and race and is collaborating with Curtis Perry on the Arden4 edition of Titus Andronicus.
:This conference was conducted virtually in early October 2020. Those interested may access session recordings and other resources related to the conference [https://www.newberry.org/10022020-food-and-book-1300-1800 here].


Invited Speakers: Geraldine Heng (University of Texas) and Margo Hendricks (University of California, Santa Cruz) will open the conference on Thursday evening at the Folger Shakespeare Library. On Friday and Saturday at American University Washington College of Law, eight speakers will deliver presentations and lead sessions on the topics outlined above: Dennis Britton (University of New Hampshire), Ruben Espinosa, (University of Texas at El Paso), Michael Gomez (New York University), Wan-Chuan Kao (Washington & Lee University), Carol Mejia LaPerle (Wright State University), Su Fang Ng (Virginia Tech), Mary Rambaran-Olm (Independent Scholar), and Michelle M. Sauer (University of North Dakota). Marisa Fuentes (Rutgers University), Haruko Momma (New York University), and Elisa Oh (Howard University) will serve as the conference’s respondents.


Schedule: Thursday evening through Saturday, 5 – 7 September 2019
'''[[Neighborhood, Community, and Place in Early Modern London]]'''


Apply: 10 June 2019 for consortium grants-in-aid; registrations will be accepted through 5 August 2019 as space remains. We are seeking external funding for non-consortium affiliates.
:'''Christopher Highley''' and '''Alan Farmer'''


:Online Seminar in partnership with The Ohio State University


The Languages of Nature: Science, Literature, and the Imagination
:This interdisciplinary seminar invited scholars working on the metropolis of London from roughly 1450 through 1750 to reflect on existing scholarship and to explore how new approaches might enrich and deepen our understanding of key concepts like “neighborhood,” “community,” and “place.” Drawing on online resources like the Map of Early Modern London (MoEML), the seminar combined case studies of particular spaces and places—including parishes and streets, as well as bookstores, printing houses, company halls, prisons, and others suggested by participants—with discussions of methodology. The goal was to open up a number of theoretical questions with examples drawn from current research: What do literary and social historians mean by neighborhood and community? Are neighborhoods defined solely by official territorial subdivisions like parishes, precincts, and wards, or are they more elastic, improvised, imagined, and performed? And what is the relation between neighborhood and community in early modern London? Is the latter always tied to a particular place or is it a non-spatialized construct?
Paula Findlen
Fall Workshop


This two-day workshop brings together scholars in different fields—the histories of science, medicine, and technology; literary criticism; and allied disciplines—to explore the entanglements of scientific and literary mentalities and investigate how they mutually informed each other circa 1500 to 1800. During this period, writing about nature evolved rapidly, inspiring many new scientific and literary genres and kinds of publications, including experiments with the written word and the relations between words and images. The emergence of new scientific instruments, practices, and institutions spurred other kinds of writing about science and its discoveries, in prose and poetry. The scientific letter morphed into the scientific article in an expanding variety of publications—learned journals, gazettes, magazines, and newspapers. Writing about scientific practitioners and philosophical thinkers—anatomists, astronomers, natural philosophers, experimenters—captured the changing state of knowledge on a more personal level, transforming leading minds into public figures. In early modern Europe and its overseas colonies, long before modern debates about “two cultures,” how did an encyclopedic understanding of knowledge, new forms of scientific observation, and the emergence of an imaginative vocabulary to describe natural phenomena shape early modern mentalities? 
:'''Directors''': '''Christopher Highley''' teaches in the English department and directs the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the Ohio State University.  He is finishing a book called ''Blackfriars: Theater, Church, and Neighborhood in Early Modern London,'' and leading a parish project for 'The Map of Early Modern London.' '''Alan B. Farmer''' is an Associate Professor of English at the Ohio State University. He has published extensively on the publication of early modern playbooks. He is the co-editor, with Adam Zucker, of ''Localizing Caroline Drama: Politics and Economics of the Early Modern English Stage, 1625–1642'' (2006), and the co-creator, with Zachary Lesser, of ''DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks''. His current book project is on popularity in the early modern English book trade and includes an investigation of the cultural geography of bookselling in early modern London.


Director: Paula Findlen is Ubaldo Pierotti Professor of Italian History at Stanford University and Director of the Suppes Center for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. Her many publications include Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting and Scientific Culture (1994), Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything (2002), and Leonardo’s Library: The World of a Renaissance Reader (2019).
:This online seminar was conducted in early October 2020. A bibliography and associated resources can be found [[Neighborhood,_Community,_and_Place_in_Early_Modern_London_(seminar)|here]].


Invited Speakers: Eileen Reeves (Princeton University) will open the workshop with a plenary lecture. Invited speakers include: Liza Blake (University of Toronto), Tita Chico (University of Maryland, College Park), Dániel Margócsy (Cambridge University), María Portuondo (Johns Hopkins University), Jennifer Rampling (Princeton University), Arielle Saiber (Bowdoin College), David Carroll Simon (University of Maryland, College Park), and Jessica Wolfe (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). Claire Preston (Queen Mary University of London) will join Paula Findlen for the closing session.


Schedule: Friday and Saturday, 13 – 14 September 2019.
'''[[Shakespeare in Prisons]]'''


Apply: 10 June 2019 for admission and grants-in-aid.
:'''Peter Holland''', '''Scott Jackson''', and''' Curt Tofteland'''


:Fall Conference at the University of Notre Dame


Political Personhood in the Early Modern British World before 1800
:Building on three previous iterations, over the course of the 2020-2021 academic year, this conference gathered theatre arts practitioners, researchers, and scholars who are currently engaged with or interested in programs for incarcerated (and post-incarcerated) populations. Designed to stimulate discussion through speakers, performances, and workshop sessions offering case studies and best practices within the Shakespeare Behind Bars movement, this conference considers a number of questions: What is the nature of Shakespeare’s exploration of prisons, prisoners, and the post-incarcerated, and how might Shakespeare speak to the realities of prison life in the United States and the experiences of returning citizens today? What are the possibilities for academic research on this work and its implications for future directions in Shakespeare studies, and how might that research intersect with, for instance, work on gender and sexuality, disability, childhood, and educational practices and pedagogies? Scholars and practitioners who are interested in sharing their experiences or learning how one works with Shakespeare and incarcerated populations are welcome to attend.
Fall Symposium


Sponsored by the Folger Institute Center for the History of British Political Thought
:'''Organizers''': '''Peter Holland''' is McMeel Family Professor in Shakespeare Studies in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame. He was editor of ''Shakespeare Survey'' for 19 years and co-editor of the Oxford Shakespeare Topics and ''Great Shakespeareans ''series''. ''His edition of ''Coriolanus'' for the Arden Shakespeare 3rd series appeared in 2013''.'' He is a General Editor of the Arden Shakespeare 4th series and currently finishing a book on ''Shakespeare and Forgetting''. '''Scott Jackson''' has served as the Mary Irene Ryan Family Executive Director of Shakespeare at Notre Dame since the position was created in 2007. A believer in the power of the theatre arts to effect positive social change, he is a co-founder of the Shakespeare in Prisons Network and teaches a weekly Shakespeare in performance course at the Westville Correctional Facility. '''Curt L. Tofteland''' is the Founder of the internationally acclaimed Shakespeare Behind Bars program, now in its 25th year of continuous operation. SBB is the subject of award-winning documentary by Philomath Films. Curt was the Producing Artistic Director of Kentucky Shakespeare Festival from 1989-2008. During his twenty-year tenure, he produced fifty Shakespeare productions, directed twenty-five, and acted in eight. As a professional director and an Equity actor, he has 200+ professional productions to his credit. Additionally, he has presented 400+ performances of his one man show ''Shakespeare’s Clownes: A Foole’s Guide to Shakespeare''.


How does the complex history of how a person is defined shed light on contemporary conceptions of subjectivity, individuality, and citizenship? This symposium gathers invited speakers to open conversations on test cases involving the political philosophy and lived reality of personhood in early modern Britain, Europe, and the Atlantic World. Sessions will consider political personhood in relation to subjecthood and identity; legal rights and responsibilities; dual allegiances; enslaved people; commonwealths and commerce; petitions and protests; and the relationship between human and non-human beings. Scholars from history, legal studies, literature, philosophy, and art history whose work considers these issues are encouraged to apply.
:Schedule: This virtual program began on 9 November 2020 with a series of keynotes, panels, and community discussions. More information is available [https://shakespeare.nd.edu/service/shakespeare-in-prisons/sipc4/ here].


Organizers: The Steering Committee of the Center for the History of British Political Thought: Sharon Achinstein (Johns Hopkins University), David Armitage (Harvard University), Julia Rudolph (North Carolina State University), and Nigel Smith (Princeton University).


Program: A plenary presentation with Lauren Benton (Vanderbilt University) and Paul Halliday (University of Virginia) on Thursday evening will be followed by two days of sessions. Invited speakers include Amanda Bailey (University of Maryland), Kathy Brown (University of Pennsylvania), Urvashi Chakravarty (George Mason University), Alison Games (Georgetown University), Kinch Hoekstra (University of California at Berkeley), Daniel Hulsebosch (New York University), Hannah Weiss Muller (Brandeis University), Noémie Ndiaye (University of Chicago), Mary Nyquist (University of Toronto), Geoff Plank (University of East Anglia), Phil Stern (Duke University), Robert Travers (Cornell University), Phil Withington (University of Sheffield), and Sue Wiseman (Birkbeck College, University of London)
'''[[New Research and Performance Directions in Premodern Disability Studies]]'''


Schedule: Thursday evening through Saturday 19 – 21 September 2019.
:'''Allison P. Hobgood '''and''' Sheila T. Cavanagh'''


Apply: 10 June 2019 for admission and consortium grants-in-aid.
:Online Spring Weekend Seminar


:Centering intersectional approaches, public humanities, and activist performance, this virtual seminar will bring together teacher-scholars and practitioners working on disability studies in the premodern period. It will build on established work in medieval and early modern disability studies to consider new avenues of inquiry, cultural histories, performative possibilities, and theoretical modalities. What do practitioners learn when premodern disability studies intersects with public activism, diversity and inclusion initiatives, and provocative disability performance? How do we use cultural history and stories of disability from the past as modes of contemporary consciousness raising? What can we discover about the embodied materiality of more theoretical interventions when exploring how disabled actors and audiences, in the past and present, engage with premodern drama and literature? In collaboration with Emory University and Georgia Humanities, participants in this virtual seminar will have opportunities to learn from leading experts in disability and performance studies and dynamically dialogue as they investigate how scholars, writers, texts, performers, and performances have—then and now—understood, experienced, and responded to bodymind difference.


Researching the Archive
:'''Directors''': '''Allison P. Hobgood''' is Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at Willamette University. Her publications include ''Recovering Disability in Early Modern England ''(2013), a special issue of ''Pedagogy ''(2015) on disability pedagogies, and essays in ''Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare'' (2019), ''The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability ''(2017), and ''Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body'' (2015). '''Sheila T. Cavanagh''' is Professor of English at Emory University and Director of the World Shakespeare Project. She served as Fulbright Global Shakespeare Centre Distinguished Chair and as Director of Emory’s Year of Shakespeare. Author of books on Spenser and Lady Mary Wroth, she has published widely on international Shakespeare, pedagogy; and accessibility in Shakespearean teaching and performance.
Alison Games and Laura L. Knoppers
Dissertation Seminar


This monthly seminar focuses on the wealth of archival material available for the study of the history, culture, society, and literature of early modern Britain and Europe, broadly conceived. Seminar participants will explore a variety of printed and manuscript sources relevant to both English and History Ph.D. candidates and will learn (with the assistance of Folger staff) some essential research skills. Throughout, the goal will be to foster interdisciplinary scholarship while considering broad methodological and theoretical problems relevant to current work in early modern studies. Preference will be given to applicants who have completed course work and preliminary exams; they should be preparing a prospectus or beginning to write chapters and be ready to make significant use of the Folger’s collections as part of their monthly visits. 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: Alison Games is the Dorothy M. Brown Distinguished Professor of History at Georgetown University. She writes on different aspects of the English engagement with the seventeenth-century world. Author of The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560-1660 (2008), she is completing a book tentatively titled Inventing the English Massacre: History, Memory, and Amboyna. Laura L. Knoppers is George N. Shuster Professor of English Literature at the University of Notre Dame. Her research focuses on seventeenth-century literature, politics, and religion, especially the work of John Milton. Most recently the author of Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve (2011), she is completing a study of luxury and the court of Charles II.
'''[[Reimagining Andrew Marvell: The Poet at 400]]'''


Schedule: Friday afternoons, 1:00 – 4:30 p.m., 27 September, 25 October, 22 November, and 13 December 2019; with several virtual meetings in the spring and a late-spring reunion workshop to be scheduled.
:'''Matthew Augustine''' and '''Giulio Pertile'''


Apply: 10 June 2019 for admission and grants-in-aid. Only Folger Institute consortium affiliates may apply.
:Online Spring Weekend Colloquium


:This weekend colloquium brought together an international team of scholars to celebrate the approaching quatercentenary of Andrew Marvell’s birth. Its aims were twofold: to chart the advances in Marvell scholarship since the publication of landmark editions of Marvell’s poetry and prose at the start of the millennium; and to inaugurate a new century of Marvell studies, of fresh approaches and new contexts. Perhaps the most important contribution to the last anniversary conference on Marvell, in 1978, was made by Christopher Hill, who insisted on seeing politics as essential to Marvell’s writing. In this colloquium, we mean to build on the superb historical scholarship that has emerged since then by seeking an even broader, more elastic concept of the political. At the same time, in asking what comes “after” politics, this colloquium also calls for renewed attention to Marvell’s verse in the context of recent work on the relationship between literature and the environment, affect, and cognition. The strong tradition of editing and archival research which surrounds Marvell serves to remind us that all such inquiry is conditioned by the materiality of reading, writing, and reception.


Rethinking Lyric Histories
:Organizers: '''Matthew Augustine''' and '''Giulio Pertile''' are Senior Lecturer and Lecturer, respectively, in the School of English at the University of St Andrews.
Ayesha Ramachandran
Fall Semester Seminar


Lyric poetry’s engagement of the dialectic between universal and particular, community and self, private and public, suggests why it is a crucial (and difficult) test case for recent trends in early modern studies. This seminar explores how such paradoxes have come to define the lyric, combining an overview of the early modern European lyric with a philosophically-driven treatment of its relationship to history and selfhood. It will focus on the early modern period, from roughly Petrarch to Milton, an arc which sees the emergence of diverse lyric forms in all European vernaculars. Themes will include the material cultures of lyric production and dissemination; the performance and transmission of lyric poetry; structuralist efforts to define the lyric in formal terms; and debates over the (continuing) political-ethical function of lyric poetry. Participants will pay close attention to the construction of literary genealogies, tracing how early modern lyric shapes a network that reaches back to antiquity and forward to romanticism and modernism. Drawing on the Folger’s rich holdings, they will examine the affiliations of lyric with other genres (drama, romance, epic, novel, caption, epigram and epigraph), its textual presence across various media, and its shape-shifting use across lines of gender and class. Depending on participant interests, the seminar might include a comparative component, engaging with the lyric’s cross-cultural presence within and beyond Europe.
:Invited speakers: '''Martin Dzelzainis''' (University of Leicester); '''Kathleen Lynch''' (Folger Institute); '''James Loxley''' (University of Edinburgh); '''Nicholas McDowell''' (University of Exeter); '''Victoria Moul''' (University College London); '''David Norbrook''' (University of Oxford); '''Tessie Prakas''' (Scripps College); '''Joanna Picciotto''' (University of California, Berkeley); '''Diane Purkiss''' (University of Oxford); '''Jacqueline Rose''' (University of St Andrews); '''Nigel Smith''' (Princeton University); '''Noël Sugimura''' (University of Oxford); '''Gordon Teskey''' (Harvard University); '''Esther van Raamsdonk''' (Queen Mary University of London); '''Nicholas von Maltzahn''' (University of Ottawa); and '''Steven N. Zwicker''' (Washington University, St Louis). The programme can be found [https://marvell400.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/programme/ here].  


Director: Ayesha Ramachandran is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. Author of The Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe (2015), numerous articles, and co-editor, with Melissa Sanchez, of a special issue of Spenser Studies, she is currently at work on a monograph titled “Lyric Thinking: Poetry, Selfhood, Modernity.”


Schedule: Friday afternoons, 1:00 – 4:30 p.m., 4 October through 6 December 2019, excluding 18 October and 29 November.
'''[[Introduction to English Paleography]]'''


Apply: 10 June 2019 for admission and grants-in-aid; 3 September 2019 for admission only.
:'''Heather Wolfe'''


:Online Weeklong Skills Course


Book Theory
: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 manuscripts in the Folger collection and manuscripts from the Center for Renaissance Studies, up to fifteen participants will be trained in the accurate reading and transcription of secretary, italic, and mixed hands. They will also 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. All transcriptions made by participants will become part of the Early Modern Manuscripts Online (EMMO) corpus.
Juliet Fleming
Weekend Seminar


This seminar will subject the book to intense theoretical scrutiny. While not discounting current knowledge of what books are or may be in their diverse material formats, its primary undertaking will be to bring to light, share, and develop the productive uncertainty that results from a theoretical consideration of the question, what is a book? Behind that ontological crux lie others whose common answers we will also need get beyond: what is writing? what is a surface? what is an archive? Starting from readings of the provocative but clarifying work on these topics by Jacques Derrida, whose entire career was spanned and structured by his interest in book history, seminar participants will be invited to bring their own topics and case histories to the table, especially as these may be illustrated with materials drawn from the Folger and other collections. These will be collectively examined in the strange new light cast by Derrida’s disruptive thought on the ontology of the book. Areas of further discussion might include the recovery of graffiti, the possible futures of book theory, and what early modern writing technologies might teach scholars of the book about the design and practices of contemporary classrooms.  
:'''Director''': '''Heather Wolfe''' is Curator of Manuscripts and Associate Librarian of Audience Development at the Folger Shakespeare Library, co-director of the multi-year research project ''Before 'Farm to Table': Early Modern Foodways and Cultures'', and principal investigator of [[emmo.folger.edu|Early Modern Manuscripts Online]]. Author of numerous articles on early modern manuscripts, she 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). Her current research explores the social circulation of writing paper and blank books and Shakespeare’s coat of arms. 


Director: Juliet Fleming is Professor of English at New York University. She is the author of Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (2001) and Cultural Graphology: Writing After Derrida (2016); and the editor, with Bill Sherman and Adam Smyth, of The Renaissance Collage: Toward a New History of Reading (2015). She is currently preparing an annotated English translation of three of Derrida's earliest essays which offer early and more concise version of the first half of Derrida's De la Grammatologie


Schedule: Friday and Saturday, 8 – 9 November 2019.
'''[[An Orientation to Research Methods and Agendas]]'''


Apply: 3 September 2019 for admission and grants-in-aid.
:'''Marcy North''', '''Claire M. L. Bourne''', and '''Whitney Trettien'''


:Online Summer Intensive Skills Course


Intersecting the Sexual: Modes of Early Modern Embodiment
: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 was not designed to advance participants’ individual research projects. Rather, it aimed to cultivate the participants’ curiosity about primary resources by using exercises that engage their research interests. It was offered to help early-stage graduate students develop a set of research-oriented literacies as they explore Penn State’s special collections virtually in ways that will be useful for navigating other collections. With the guidance of visiting faculty and curatorial staff from the Folger and Penn State Libraries, two dozen participants examined bibliographical tools and their logics, honed their early modern book description skills, learned best practices for organizing and working with digital images, and improved their understanding of the cultural and technological histories of texts. Participants were able to ask reflexive questions about the nature of primary sources, the collections that house them, and the tools whereby one can access them.
Mario DiGangi
Fall Symposium


Differences of gender, age, and social position informed both the rhetorics and the lived experiences of sexuality in the early modern period. Yet other modes of embodiment—such as those associated with racial identity, physical incapacity, impoverished vagrancy, and conspicuous sartorial display—also impacted sexual practices and meanings in ways that have yet to receive sustained scholarly attention. Rather than simply expanding the category of the sexual, this symposium aims to understand how a focus on these other modes of embodiment might complicate or unsettle current theories and histories of sexuality. While building on insights from early modern sexuality studies, presenters will also draw on theoretical models and methods from adjacent fields such as early modern race studies, disability studies, transgender studies, global Renaissance studies, material culture studies, and posthumanist studies. How might the objects and questions foregrounded by such approaches advance the study of early modern sexuality beyond familiar paradigms? How might such intersections contribute to both historicist and present-day understandings of sex, gender, and embodiment?
:'''Organizers''': '''Marcy North''' is Associate Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University and author of ''The Anonymous Renaissance ''and numerous articles on early print, manuscript, and women’s writings. She has directed a previous Folger seminar and participated in the Folger's ''Teaching Paleography ''and ''Advanced Paleography ''workshops. She is finishing a book on the intersection of labor and taste in the production of post-print manuscripts. '''Claire M. L. Bourne''' is Assistant Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of ''Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England'' (forthcoming), which was supported by a long-term Folger fellowship, and is currently editing 1 ''Henry the Sixth'' for the Arden Shakespeare (4th series). '''Whitney Trettien''' teaches digital humanities and book history at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is Assistant Professor of English. She is the author of ''Cut/Copy/Paste'', a hybrid monograph on digital book history currently being staged on Manifold Scholarship through University of Minnesota Press.
 
Organizer: Mario DiGangi is Professor of English at Lehman College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. He is the author of The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama (1997) and Sexual Types: Embodiment, Agency, and Dramatic Character from Shakespeare to Shirley (2011). He has edited three plays by Shakespeare and, with Amanda Bailey, Affect Theory and Early Modern Texts: Politics, Ecologies, Form (2017). His current project explores sexuality and race in English Renaissance literature.
 
Invited Speakers: Ian Smith (Lafayette College) and Valerie Traub (University of Michigan) will open the symposium with plenary lectures on Thursday evening. On Friday and Saturday, twelve speakers will open conversation on the areas outlined above: Abdulhamit Arvas (University of California, Santa Barbara), Amanda Bailey (University of Maryland), James Bromley (Miami University), Simone Chess (Wayne State University), Julie Crawford (Columbia University), Ari Friedlander (University of Mississippi), Colby Gordon (Bryn Mawr College), Natasha Korda (Wesleyan University), Vin Nardizzi (University of British Columbia), Carmen Nocentelli (University of New Mexico), Marjorie Rubright (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), Christine Varnado (University at Buffalo). Jeffrey Masten (Northwestern University) will serve as the symposium’s respondent.
 
Schedule: Thursday evening through Saturday, 14 – 16 November 2019.
 
Apply: 3 September 2019 for admission and grants-in-aid.
 
 
Eating through the Archives: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Early Modern Foodways
Fall Graduate Student Workshop
 
Sponsored by Before ‘Farm to Table’: Early Modern Foodways and Cultures, the inaugural project of the Andrew W. Mellon Initiative in Collaborative Research at the Folger Institute
 
Food permeates every aspect of the early modern world, from the social rituals of the London coffee house to the saltfish eaten by enslaved people in Barbados, from the disappearing banquet in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest to the spare olla of Don Quixote’s rustic table. Food’s omnipresence is both a potential smorgasbord for scholars and an embarrassment of riches, for studying and talking about food is a complex affair that tests the boundaries of traditional disciplines. The program invites up to two dozen graduate students to reconsider the term “foodways” as a framework that maps the convergence of disciplines, including history, literary studies, biology, ecology, philosophy, mathematics, culinary studies, and art history. The Before ‘Farm to Table’ team will lead group discussions as well as focused break-out sessions centered around a core set of primary sources, including our collection of over one hundred early modern English manuscript recipe books—the largest such collection in the world—as well as other texts and images from the Folger collection.
 
Organizers: This weekend program is organized by four members of the Folger Institute’s Mellon-funded collaborative research project team, Before ‘Farm to Table’: Early Modern Foodways and Cultures. Project co-director David B. Goldstein (Associate Professor of English at York University) publishes on early modern foodways, including Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare’s England, two co-edited essay collections (Culinary Shakespeare and Shakespeare and Hospitality), and two books of poetry. Jack Bouchard (Postdoctoral Research Fellow) is an historian of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century north Atlantic fisheries, especially Newfoundland. In her research, Elisa Tersigni (Postdoctoral Digital Research Fellow) combines algorithmic analysis and analytical bibliography to study the language and literature of the English Reformation. Michael Walkden (Postdoctoral Research Fellow) explores links between digestion and emotion in early modern medicine and culture. They will be joined by project co-directors Amanda Herbert (Associate Director for Fellowships, Folger Institute) and Heather Wolfe (Curator of Manuscripts and Associate Librarian of Audience Development at the Folger Shakespeare Library).
 
Schedule: Thursday afternoon through Saturday, 5 – 7 December 2019. An additional, optional night of lodging on Wednesday, 4 December may be funded for admitted participants.
 
Apply: 3 September 2019 for admission and grants-in-aid. Funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation extends eligibility to graduate students regardless of affiliation. Ph.D. candidates will receive priority in admission.
 
 
The Visual Art of Grammar: Iconographies of Language from Europe to the Americas
Andrew Laird
Weekend Seminar at Brown University
 
Grammar was the cornerstone of Renaissance humanism. The design and decoration of manuscripts and books devoted to the discipline signaled its importance, while elaborate diagrams and allegorical illustrations gave a fuller impression of the vital role of grammar in education. Such visualizations could acquire deeper significance, given the connection in ancient Greek between gramma, “drawing” or “letter,” and grammatike, source of the Latin grammatica. Further depictions and emblems were devised by creole and native artists in the Americas, as missionary linguists applied the European art of grammar to the systematization of indigenous languages in the New World. This interdisciplinary seminar will welcome up to sixteen faculty and graduate student participants to consider the early modern iconography of grammar as a basis for exploring broader historical conceptions of the relation between language and the visual field. Participants will also have the opportunity to examine copies of relevant Renaissance texts from the John Hay Library as well as a number of grammars, artes (manuals), and vocabularies of American languages in the John Carter Brown Library.
 
Director: Andrew Laird is John Rowe Workman Distinguished Professor of Classics and Humanities at Brown University. His books include Powers of Expression, Expressions of Power (1999), The Epic of America (2006) and Antiquities and Classical Traditions in Latin America (2018). His most recent publications treat the relation of Latin to Amerindian languages, and the influence of European humanism on missionaries and native scholars in post-conquest Mexico. The seminar will be joined by Ahuvia Kahane (Trinity College Dublin).
 
Schedule: Friday and Saturday, 1 – 2 November 2019
 
Apply: 3 September 2019 for admission and grants-in-aid.
 
 
Early Modern Iroquoia
Scott Manning Stevens
Spring Semester Seminar at Syracuse University
 
This seminar examines key areas of cultural difference between Native Americans and Europeans during the early modern period by focusing on their interactions in the Haudenosaunee homelands—sometimes referred to as Iroquoia. The five-nation confederacy—made up of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca peoples—reached the apex of its power during the course of the seventeenth century, simultaneous to its contact with French, Dutch, and English colonial endeavors. In their struggles for hegemony over North America, these same Europeans recorded their observations of the Haudenosaunee peoples with whom they interacted and in doing so produced as unusually rich archive focused on Haudenosaunee culture. During the seminar, participants will also attend to the continuing oral cultures that have preserved an Indigenous perspective on this same history and its legacy among the Haudenosaunee. An analysis of these two archives, written and oral, explores the profound cultural differences around notions of ecology, gender, and politics, not only for Euro-Iroquoian relations, but for those relations with other Indigenous nations encountered throughout the colonization and conquest of North America.
 
Director: Scott Manning Stevens is Associate Professor of English and Director of Native American and Indigenous Studies at Syracuse University. A citizen of the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation, he works primarily on Native American cultures of the Northeast from the pre-colonial period to the present. In addition to many articles and book chapters, his recent publications include Why You Can't Teach United States History without American Indians (2015).
 
Schedule: Schedule: Fridays 1:30-5:00pm, 24 January through 17 April 2020, excluding 20 March.
 
Apply: 3 September 2019 for consortium grants-in-aid to support travel and lodging.
 
 
Reimagining Andrew Marvell: The Poet at 400
Matthew Augustine and Giulio Pertile
Spring Weekend Colloquium at the University of St Andrews
 
This weekend colloquium brings together an international team of scholars to celebrate the approaching quatercentenary of Andrew Marvell’s birth. Its aims are twofold: to chart the advances in Marvell scholarship since the publication of landmark editions of Marvell’s poetry and prose at the start of the millennium; and to inaugurate a new century of Marvell studies, of fresh approaches and new contexts. Perhaps the most important contribution to the last anniversary conference on Marvell, in 1978, was made by Christopher Hill, who insisted on seeing politics as essential to Marvell’s writing. In this colloquium, we mean to build on the superb historical scholarship that has emerged since then by seeking an even broader, more elastic concept of the political. At the same time, in asking what comes “after” politics, this colloquium also calls for renewed attention to Marvell’s verse in the context of recent work on the relationship between literature and the environment, affect, and cognition. The strong tradition of editing and archival research which surrounds Marvell serves to remind us that all such inquiry is conditioned by the materiality of reading, writing, and reception.
 
Organizers: Matthew Augustine and Giulio Pertile are Senior Lecturer and Lecturer, respectively, in the School of English at the University of St Andrews.
 
Invited speakers: Martin Dzelzainis (University of Leicester); James Loxley (University of Edinburgh); Nicholas McDowell (University of Exeter); Victoria Moul (University College London); David Norbrook (University of Oxford); Tessie Prakas (Scripps College); Joanna Picciotto (University of California, Berkeley); Diane Purkiss (University of Oxford); Jacqueline Rose (University of St Andrews); Nigel Smith (Princeton University); Noël Sugimura (University of Oxford); Gordon Teskey (Harvard University); Esther van Raamsdonk (Queen Mary University of London); Nicholas von Maltzahn (University of Ottawa); and Steven N. Zwicker (Washington University, St Louis).
 
Schedule: Thursday through Saturday, 7 – 9 May 2020
 
Apply: 13 January 2020 for Folger Institute consortium grants-in-aid.
 
 
An Orientation to Research Methods and Agendas
Marcy North, Claire M. L. Bourne, and Whitney Trettien
Summer Intensive Skills Course at Pennsylvania State University
 
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 Penn State’s special collections in ways that will be useful for navigating other collections. With the guidance of visiting faculty and curatorial staff from the Folger and Penn State Libraries, up to two dozen 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.
 
Organizers: Marcy North is Associate Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University and author of The Anonymous Renaissance and numerous articles on early print, manuscript, and women’s writings. She has directed a previous Folger seminar and participated in the Folger's Teaching Paleography and Advanced Paleography workshops. She is finishing a book on the intersection of labor and taste in the production of post-print manuscripts. Claire M. L. Bourne is Assistant Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England (forthcoming), which was supported by a long-term Folger fellowship, and is currently editing 1 Henry the Sixth for the Arden Shakespeare (4th series). Whitney Trettien teaches digital humanities and book history at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is Assistant Professor of English. She is the author of Cut/Copy/Paste, a hybrid monograph on digital book history currently being staged on Manifold Scholarship through University of Minnesota Press.
 
Schedule: Monday through Friday, 9:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m., 1 – 5 June 2020.
 
Apply: 2 March 2020 for admission and grants-in-aid. This skills course is intended for students in the early years of graduate work. In addition to following the general application guidelines, applicants for this course should describe a research question, the motivating reason to look to primary sources to answer this question, and any previous experience with early modern materials. If a participant is able to arrange for one graduate credit on the home campus under the direction of an on-campus advisor, the Institute will certify participation.
 
 
Making Meaning: Hands-on Basic Paleography and Book Production
Margaret J.M. Ezell and Kevin M. O’Sullivan
Summer Intensive Skills Course at Texas A&M University
 
Integrating traditional seminar-based discussion with experiential inquiry, this course will investigate the physical means of knowledge production during the early modern period. Daily lab sessions concentrating on historical book production will include hands-on exercises in allied trades such as typecasting, papermaking, ink-making, typesetting, and hand-press printing. In addition to this print-oriented praxis, participants will also experience manuscript production through experimentation with contemporary writing materials such as goose quills and iron gall ink as part of their paleography work. Throughout the week, guided discussions of assigned theoretical readings will synthesize issues raised by the hands-on practice within a wider theoretical framework on media intersections. The course will seek to demonstrate the ways technologies of textual production drove meaning-making in the early modern period and foster an understanding of the rich interrelations between the manuscript tradition and renaissance printing. Equipped with these skills, participants will be able not only to read and analyze the texts, but to locate their place in the larger context of early modern written culture.
 
Directors: Margaret J.M. Ezell is Distinguished Professor of English and the John and Sara H. Lindsey Chair of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University. In her most recent work, the Oxford English Literary History, Volume V:  1645-1714, the Later Seventeenth Century, she offers an alternative model of literary history exploring how oral traditions, handwritten manuscript practices, and print media intersected and influenced each other. Kevin M. O’Sullivan is Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts for the Cushing Memorial Library & Archives at Texas A&M University, where he also serves as the Director of the Book History Workshop. He is a founding partner of the 3Dhotbed Project, a collaborative digital humanities effort that seeks to enhance book history instruction through 3D technologies. They will be joined by Heather Wolfe (Curator of Manuscripts and Associate Librarian of Audience Development at the Folger Shakespeare Library).
 
Schedule: Monday through Friday, 9:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m., 13 – 17 July 2020.
 
Apply: 2 March 2020 for admission and grants-in-aid.

Latest revision as of 16:09, 24 June 2021

This article lists the scholarly programming of the Folger Institute for the 2020–2021 academic year, which underwent significant changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic. For more past programming, please see the article Folger Institute scholarly programs archive.


Researching the Archive

Joyce E. Chaplin and Julie Crawford
Dissertation Seminar
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. During the virtual sessions, participants explored a variety of printed and manuscript sources relevant to both English and History Ph.D. candidates. The goal throughout will be to foster interdisciplinary scholarship while considering broad methodological and theoretical problems relevant to current work in early modern studies. Preference will be given to applicants who have completed course work and preliminary exams; they should be preparing a prospectus or beginning to write chapters and be ready to make significant use of archival and special collections as part of their visits. 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.
DirectorsJoyce 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."


Food and the Book: 1300-1800

Organized by David B. GoldsteinAllen James Grieco, and Sarah Peters Kernan
Virtual Conference at the Newberry Library
Co-sponsored by the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library and the Folger Institute’s collaborative research project, Before ‘Farm to Table’: Early Modern Foodways and Cultures, a Mellon Foundation initiative at the Folger Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library
The growing, preparation, tasting, and eating of food are bodily phenomena. To gain access to them through the distances of history, we must turn to words and images. This interdisciplinary conference examined the book as a primary intersection for foodways throughout the early modern world. The language and imagery of food emerge in all manner of books, including recipe manuscripts, literature, historical documents, religious writings, medical treatises, and engravings, not to mention in marginal stains and other chance material encounters. The convened speakers explored how food interacts with books as physical objects as well as mental ones. They examined books as ways of studying food and its representations in historical perspective, especially those of marginalized and underprivileged people; and as instances of metaphorical food and sustenance in themselves. The conference also hosted collaborations between scholars, food writers, and chefs, resulting in cooking experiments and discussions of current food issues that helped reinvigorate questions about early modern cuisine for a contemporary world.
OrganizersDavid B. Goldstein is a co-director of the Before Farm to Table project and Associate Professor of English at York University in Toronto. His publications include Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare’s England (2013), which shared the Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award, and two co-edited essay collections—Culinary Shakespeare (with Amy Tigner, 2016) and Shakespeare and Hospitality (with Julia Reinhard Lupton, 2016). Allen J. Grieco is Senior Research Associate Emeritus at Villa I Tatti (The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies). He has published extensively on the cultural history of food in Italy from the 14th to the 16th centuries including a recent volume on Food, Social Politics and the Order of the World in Renaissance Italy (2019). He is both co-editor in chief of the journal Food & History (Brepols) and Series Editor of Food Culture, Food History (13th-19thcenturies) (Amsterdam University Press). Sarah Peters Kernan PhD is an independent culinary historian based in Chicago. Her research focuses on cookbooks and culinary activity in medieval and early modern England. She is an editor of The Recipes Project and a Corresponding Member of the journal Food & History. She regularly collaborates with The Newberry Library on teaching and digital learning projects and has also worked with organizations including The Met Cloisters and the Culinary Historians of Chicago.
This conference was conducted virtually in early October 2020. Those interested may access session recordings and other resources related to the conference here.


Neighborhood, Community, and Place in Early Modern London

Christopher Highley and Alan Farmer
Online Seminar in partnership with The Ohio State University
This interdisciplinary seminar invited scholars working on the metropolis of London from roughly 1450 through 1750 to reflect on existing scholarship and to explore how new approaches might enrich and deepen our understanding of key concepts like “neighborhood,” “community,” and “place.” Drawing on online resources like the Map of Early Modern London (MoEML), the seminar combined case studies of particular spaces and places—including parishes and streets, as well as bookstores, printing houses, company halls, prisons, and others suggested by participants—with discussions of methodology. The goal was to open up a number of theoretical questions with examples drawn from current research: What do literary and social historians mean by neighborhood and community? Are neighborhoods defined solely by official territorial subdivisions like parishes, precincts, and wards, or are they more elastic, improvised, imagined, and performed? And what is the relation between neighborhood and community in early modern London? Is the latter always tied to a particular place or is it a non-spatialized construct?
DirectorsChristopher Highley teaches in the English department and directs the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the Ohio State University.  He is finishing a book called Blackfriars: Theater, Church, and Neighborhood in Early Modern London, and leading a parish project for 'The Map of Early Modern London.' Alan B. Farmer is an Associate Professor of English at the Ohio State University. He has published extensively on the publication of early modern playbooks. He is the co-editor, with Adam Zucker, of Localizing Caroline Drama: Politics and Economics of the Early Modern English Stage, 1625–1642 (2006), and the co-creator, with Zachary Lesser, of DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks. His current book project is on popularity in the early modern English book trade and includes an investigation of the cultural geography of bookselling in early modern London.
This online seminar was conducted in early October 2020. A bibliography and associated resources can be found here.


Shakespeare in Prisons

Peter HollandScott Jackson, and Curt Tofteland
Fall Conference at the University of Notre Dame
Building on three previous iterations, over the course of the 2020-2021 academic year, this conference gathered theatre arts practitioners, researchers, and scholars who are currently engaged with or interested in programs for incarcerated (and post-incarcerated) populations. Designed to stimulate discussion through speakers, performances, and workshop sessions offering case studies and best practices within the Shakespeare Behind Bars movement, this conference considers a number of questions: What is the nature of Shakespeare’s exploration of prisons, prisoners, and the post-incarcerated, and how might Shakespeare speak to the realities of prison life in the United States and the experiences of returning citizens today? What are the possibilities for academic research on this work and its implications for future directions in Shakespeare studies, and how might that research intersect with, for instance, work on gender and sexuality, disability, childhood, and educational practices and pedagogies? Scholars and practitioners who are interested in sharing their experiences or learning how one works with Shakespeare and incarcerated populations are welcome to attend.
OrganizersPeter Holland is McMeel Family Professor in Shakespeare Studies in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame. He was editor of Shakespeare Survey for 19 years and co-editor of the Oxford Shakespeare Topics and Great Shakespeareans seriesHis edition of Coriolanus for the Arden Shakespeare 3rd series appeared in 2013. He is a General Editor of the Arden Shakespeare 4th series and currently finishing a book on Shakespeare and ForgettingScott Jackson has served as the Mary Irene Ryan Family Executive Director of Shakespeare at Notre Dame since the position was created in 2007. A believer in the power of the theatre arts to effect positive social change, he is a co-founder of the Shakespeare in Prisons Network and teaches a weekly Shakespeare in performance course at the Westville Correctional Facility. Curt L. Tofteland is the Founder of the internationally acclaimed Shakespeare Behind Bars program, now in its 25th year of continuous operation. SBB is the subject of award-winning documentary by Philomath Films. Curt was the Producing Artistic Director of Kentucky Shakespeare Festival from 1989-2008. During his twenty-year tenure, he produced fifty Shakespeare productions, directed twenty-five, and acted in eight. As a professional director and an Equity actor, he has 200+ professional productions to his credit. Additionally, he has presented 400+ performances of his one man show Shakespeare’s Clownes: A Foole’s Guide to Shakespeare.
Schedule: This virtual program began on 9 November 2020 with a series of keynotes, panels, and community discussions. More information is available here.


New Research and Performance Directions in Premodern Disability Studies

Allison P. Hobgood and Sheila T. Cavanagh
Online Spring Weekend Seminar
Centering intersectional approaches, public humanities, and activist performance, this virtual seminar will bring together teacher-scholars and practitioners working on disability studies in the premodern period. It will build on established work in medieval and early modern disability studies to consider new avenues of inquiry, cultural histories, performative possibilities, and theoretical modalities. What do practitioners learn when premodern disability studies intersects with public activism, diversity and inclusion initiatives, and provocative disability performance? How do we use cultural history and stories of disability from the past as modes of contemporary consciousness raising? What can we discover about the embodied materiality of more theoretical interventions when exploring how disabled actors and audiences, in the past and present, engage with premodern drama and literature? In collaboration with Emory University and Georgia Humanities, participants in this virtual seminar will have opportunities to learn from leading experts in disability and performance studies and dynamically dialogue as they investigate how scholars, writers, texts, performers, and performances have—then and now—understood, experienced, and responded to bodymind difference.
DirectorsAllison P. Hobgood is Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at Willamette University. Her publications include Recovering Disability in Early Modern England (2013), a special issue of Pedagogy (2015) on disability pedagogies, and essays in Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare (2019), The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability (2017), and Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body (2015). Sheila T. Cavanagh is Professor of English at Emory University and Director of the World Shakespeare Project. She served as Fulbright Global Shakespeare Centre Distinguished Chair and as Director of Emory’s Year of Shakespeare. Author of books on Spenser and Lady Mary Wroth, she has published widely on international Shakespeare, pedagogy; and accessibility in Shakespearean teaching and performance.


Reimagining Andrew Marvell: The Poet at 400

Matthew Augustine and Giulio Pertile
Online Spring Weekend Colloquium
This weekend colloquium brought together an international team of scholars to celebrate the approaching quatercentenary of Andrew Marvell’s birth. Its aims were twofold: to chart the advances in Marvell scholarship since the publication of landmark editions of Marvell’s poetry and prose at the start of the millennium; and to inaugurate a new century of Marvell studies, of fresh approaches and new contexts. Perhaps the most important contribution to the last anniversary conference on Marvell, in 1978, was made by Christopher Hill, who insisted on seeing politics as essential to Marvell’s writing. In this colloquium, we mean to build on the superb historical scholarship that has emerged since then by seeking an even broader, more elastic concept of the political. At the same time, in asking what comes “after” politics, this colloquium also calls for renewed attention to Marvell’s verse in the context of recent work on the relationship between literature and the environment, affect, and cognition. The strong tradition of editing and archival research which surrounds Marvell serves to remind us that all such inquiry is conditioned by the materiality of reading, writing, and reception.
Organizers: Matthew Augustine and Giulio Pertile are Senior Lecturer and Lecturer, respectively, in the School of English at the University of St Andrews.
Invited speakers: Martin Dzelzainis (University of Leicester); Kathleen Lynch (Folger Institute); James Loxley (University of Edinburgh); Nicholas McDowell (University of Exeter); Victoria Moul (University College London); David Norbrook (University of Oxford); Tessie Prakas (Scripps College); Joanna Picciotto (University of California, Berkeley); Diane Purkiss (University of Oxford); Jacqueline Rose (University of St Andrews); Nigel Smith (Princeton University); Noël Sugimura (University of Oxford); Gordon Teskey (Harvard University); Esther van Raamsdonk (Queen Mary University of London); Nicholas von Maltzahn (University of Ottawa); and Steven N. Zwicker (Washington University, St Louis). The programme can be found here.


Introduction to English Paleography

Heather Wolfe
Online Weeklong Skills Course
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 manuscripts in the Folger collection and manuscripts from the Center for Renaissance Studies, up to fifteen participants will be trained in the accurate reading and transcription of secretary, italic, and mixed hands. They will also 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. All transcriptions made by participants will become part of the Early Modern Manuscripts Online (EMMO) corpus.
DirectorHeather Wolfe is Curator of Manuscripts and Associate Librarian of Audience Development at the Folger Shakespeare Library, 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, she 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). Her current research explores the social circulation of writing paper and blank books and Shakespeare’s coat of arms. 


An Orientation to Research Methods and Agendas

Marcy NorthClaire M. L. Bourne, and Whitney Trettien
Online Summer Intensive Skills Course
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 was not designed to advance participants’ individual research projects. Rather, it aimed to cultivate the participants’ curiosity about primary resources by using exercises that engage their research interests. It was offered to help early-stage graduate students develop a set of research-oriented literacies as they explore Penn State’s special collections virtually in ways that will be useful for navigating other collections. With the guidance of visiting faculty and curatorial staff from the Folger and Penn State Libraries, two dozen participants examined bibliographical tools and their logics, honed their early modern book description skills, learned best practices for organizing and working with digital images, and improved their understanding of the cultural and technological histories of texts. Participants were able to ask reflexive questions about the nature of primary sources, the collections that house them, and the tools whereby one can access them.
OrganizersMarcy North is Associate Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University and author of The Anonymous Renaissance and numerous articles on early print, manuscript, and women’s writings. She has directed a previous Folger seminar and participated in the Folger's Teaching Paleography and Advanced Paleography workshops. She is finishing a book on the intersection of labor and taste in the production of post-print manuscripts. Claire M. L. Bourne is Assistant Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England (forthcoming), which was supported by a long-term Folger fellowship, and is currently editing 1 Henry the Sixth for the Arden Shakespeare (4th series). Whitney Trettien teaches digital humanities and book history at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is Assistant Professor of English. She is the author of Cut/Copy/Paste, a hybrid monograph on digital book history currently being staged on Manifold Scholarship through University of Minnesota Press.