Researching Black Women’s Histories at the Folger - Dr. Patricia Akhimie - 9th February

The Race and the Early Modern’s inaugural seminar will be delivered by Dr. Patricia Akhimie. Dr. Akhimie is the Director of the Folger Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library and Associate Professor at Rutgers University-Newark. She will speak about an upcoming exhibition on Black women and Shakespeare that she has curated at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Date and Time: Monday 9th February, 17:00 (GMT)/12:00 (EST)

Sign up here: https://buytickets.at/centreforearlymodernstudies/2022021

Paper Abstract

The Folger will offer the exhibit (working title) “To Hear Her Speak: Black Women and Shakespeare” from October 2026 through April 2027. In this exhibit we situate Shakespeare’s works, and especially his depictions of Black women, within a much wider context. We explore the presence of Black women in the early modern world, the histories of Black women in Shakespearean performance both on and off stage, and the ways in which Black women as writers, thinkers, and artists have utilized Shakespeare’s language, forms, stories, and characters for their own purposes and to diverse ends. We share how these women, their histories, their cultures, are represented (and misrepresented) through the eyes of early modern European artists and writers; and we listen for and learn from their own voices in a wide variety of forms of expression.

Speaker Bio

Dr. Patricia Akhimie is Director of the Folger Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She also serves as Director of the RaceB4Race Mentoring Network and is an Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark.  She is the author of Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World, editor of The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race, and co-editor of Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World. Dr. Akhimie is currently working on a new edition of Othello for the Arden Shakespeare, fourth series, and a monograph about race, gender, and editing early modern texts.  Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the John Carter Brown Library and the Ford Foundation.

Image Citation: Advertisement for Richard III, directed by Adjoa Andoh (2022).