This post comes from the Early Modern Studies Working Group’s Co-Coordinator, Melissa Rohrer. Melissa is a PhD Candidate in the English Department.

In October of 2018, I visited the Folger Shakespeare Library with generous funding from the UConn Early Modern Studies Working Group and the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute. My dissertation investigates how playwrights of the early modern period adapted notorious true events for the stage—events such as true crimes and scandals. I already had access to the plays which adapted these events, so I my trip to the Folger was centered largely on learning more about how these events were understood, circulated, and commented upon, both at the time of their unfolding and in the centuries after they transpired. Continue reading →

Today’s Post is a Q&A with a new member of the EMSWG. Dr. Kathryn Moore is an Assistant Professor of Art History.

1. Can you tell us a bit about your background (academic and otherwise)? Where are you from? Where else have you taught, researched, etc?

I am from Virginia and did an interdisciplinary BA as an Echols Scholar at the University of Virginia.  I studied Latin and Italian languages and literature, as well as the history of art and architecture. I then completed an MA and PhD in art history at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, where I did coursework in Italian architectural history with Marvin Trachtenberg and Islamic art and architecture with Priscilla Soucek.  While a graduate student, I studied Turkish at the University of Chicago. My studies at New York University were supported by a Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Graduate Scholarship. In my last two years of graduate school, I was a Kress pre-doctoral Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.  After finishing my PhD, I was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh and an ACLS New Faculty Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley.  With support from the ACLS fellowship, I completed the summer intensive program in Modern Standard Arabic at the Qalam wa Lawh school in Rabat, Morocco. I then taught as an assistant professor at both the University of Hong Kong and Texas State University.  In my various positions, I have taught courses across medieval and Renaissance European art history and Islamic art history, with a particular focus on the Mediterranean research.  My research has also spanned the medieval and Renaissance periods and has taken me to Turkey, Israel, North Africa, and much of Europe.  Last year, I was a fellow at Villa I Tatti, Harvard University’s center for Renaissance studies in Florence, Italy. Continue reading →

Today’s blog post describes Dr. Ken Gouwens’ research trip to the Folger Shakespeare Library

Thanks to the generous support of our Folger Committee, I was able to return to the library for a whirlwind trip just a few weeks before it closed for renovation. While a short-term fellow there years ago, I’d discovered its wealth of emblem books, a genre that now occupies a central chapter of my book manuscript on simian-human comparisons. I’d accumulated hundreds of photographs of emblems and transcribed quite a lot of the material, not knowing, of course, what would end up being useful. Now that the chapter’s taking shape, it was absolutely essential to get back to the Folger to be sure of my documentation and to choose the most useful images from multiple editions. Continue reading →