Posts Categorized: Fellows

Picturing Children’s Food in Early Modern Europe

October 14, 2021 | By Guest Author

a guest post by Carla Cevasco While I started my Folger fellowship intending to research children’s foodways in the manuscript recipe book collection, I was surprised by how many hungry, eating, or even eaten children could be found in the Folger’s collections of visual culture. (A big shoutout to Rachel Dankert for pointing out the prevalence of children throughout these collections!)… Continue Reading

Extra-Illustrating Othello

October 7, 2021 | By Guest Author

a guest post by Patricia Akhimie On my last visit to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Fall 2019 (a time that seems all too distant now) to conduct research for a new edition of Othello, I set myself the goal of viewing every image and object related to the play in the Folger’s collection. This was an experience that often rocketed between emotional highs and lows because the Folger’s vast collection includes both art objects that delight and those that disturb.… Continue Reading

oil painting portrait of a 17th century white mine with brown hair wearing a white shirt and a dark robe on a dark background

Should we care where Lucy Hutchinson went to church?

September 23, 2021 | By Guest Author

A guest post by Crawford Gribben Over the last few years—and with the benefit of my summer Folger fellowship—I’ve been thinking about the network of friends and rivals that had at its centre the puritan theologian, John Owen (1616-83). Owen was one of the most productive writers of the seventeenth century, and the Folger holds one of the largest collections of his work.… Continue Reading

Unsung Travelers: a history of global mobility from below

September 10, 2021 | By Guest Author

A guest post by Ananya Chakravarti In March 2017, not long after President Trump stormed into office on a platform decrying “globalists,” the historian Jeremy Adelman published an essay asking whether “the short ride” of global history had come to a bumpy end. Lynn Hunt’s 2014 prognostication that global historians would help remake the world in their cosmopolitan image of the past, much as national historians had molded nations, seemed suddenly premature.… Continue Reading

Focus on a Decade of Folger Institute Research and Community

August 24, 2021 | By Owen Williams and Leah Thomas

In the past decade, seventy-five different Guest Authors have published over one hundred posts in The Collation. Roughly half of these contributors wrote posts about their experiences working with the Folger collections and researcher community through Institute-sponsored programming. Many fellows took this opportunity to share an “in progress” look at their research—what they were learning, what was surprising, and what was still challenging—and to showcase the materials they examined while in residence.… Continue Reading

The Production of Whiteness in the Anglo-French Match (1625)

August 19, 2021 | By Guest Author

A guest post by Mira Assaf Kafantaris Meghan Markle’s incorporation into the British monarchy, and her subsequent departure from it, has thrown into high relief the ideologies of whiteness at the heart of royal European traditions. Even though the symbolism of her nuptials with Prince Harry was touted as the United Kingdom’s ultimate act of reconciliation with its brutal colonial past, Markle’s inclusion in the beau monde of white Britain remained conditional.… Continue Reading

2021-2022 Folger Research Fellows

July 20, 2021 | By The Collation

The Folger Institute is pleased to announce the 2021-2022 cohort of Folger Institute Research Fellows! With the Folger Shakespeare Library building renovation project well and truly underway, the Folger collections remain unavailable for in-person consultation. However, the Folger Institute is committed to continuing its support of collections-based research, and to providing scholars with the resources they need to pursue and advance their work.… Continue Reading

Reading Anatomy Texts Like Poetry (and why we should do it more often)

July 13, 2021 | By Guest Author

A guest post by Whitney Sperrazza When we look at this page from Thomas Bartholin’s 1668 anatomy text (Folger B977), it’s easy to think of it as an objective document. We imagine we are seeing “data” about the womb and clitoris gathered by the anatomist during the dissection process. Reading science books, even old ones, this is the prevailing pattern, and one that scientists themselves continue to cultivate.… Continue Reading

Folger-Penn Press interview and excerpt: Megan Heffernan, Making the Miscellany

June 15, 2021 | By The Collation

In 2015, The Folger Shakespeare Library and the University of Pennsylvania Press established a cooperative agreement to publish volumes emerging from work substantially shaped by engagement with the Folger collections, often under the aegis of Folger Institute funding. Authors published under the agreement address topics and methodological approaches as broad as those of the collections and research activities of the Folger itself.… Continue Reading

Facial Misrecognition

May 11, 2021 | By Guest Author

A guest post by Wan-Chuan Kao Oliver Sacks, who brought to popular awareness many cognitive conditions that are simultaneously debilitating and fascinating—such as visual agnosia, of which face blindness is one type—observes that “our faces bear the stamp of our experiences and our character”; and “it is with our faces that we face the world, from the moment of birth to the moment of death.”… Continue Reading