Fellowships at the Folger Shakespeare Library
The Folger’s extraordinary collections are essential to understanding the humanities and their continued resonance and importance in our world. The Fellowships Program brings our rare and historic art, books, costumes, manuscripts, periodicals, prints, and visual resources immediately to life. We put scholars, artists, performers, and practitioners into direct and sustained engagement with the collections, with our many innovative digital resources, and with one another.
Folger fellows join together to create a high-powered, multidisciplinary community of scholars, who come from different fields but who share cognate interests in literature and history, art and performance, philosophy, religion, and politics. Scholarly discovery is a hallmark of the Folger Institute Fellowships Program. Our fellows are given the time and resources to bring their research projects to fruition. And they do so in the company of other scholars who are also engaged in testing ideas, weighing arguments, and stimulating fresh approaches to research, performance, and writing.
The Folger Institute also fosters collegiality and cooperation through its fellowships programming, designed to bring fellows into conversation with one another, with the Folger’s curators and scholars, and with members of the academic community. These events include research colloquia, working lunches, hands-on examinations of materials from the Folger collection with Folger curators, and reading group discussions on the most recent works of literary criticism, history, philosophy, and theatre studies.
We award long-term fellowships of six to nine months, and short-term fellowships for on-site, Folger residencies of one to three months.