Folger Shakespeare Library Artistic Research Fellowship

Folger Shakespeare Library Artistic Research Fellowship

2026-2027

www.folger.edu

Folger Shakespeare Library is the world's largest Shakespeare collection, the ultimate resource for exploring Shakespeare and his world. Shakespeare belongs to you. His world is vast. Come explore. Join us online, on the road, or in Washington, DC.

Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C.

Project title: Monstrous and Sacred Bodies: Imagining the East in Early Modern Europe

Valkyrie Yao will undertake an artistic research fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library for Monstrous and Sacred Bodies: Imagining the East in Early Modern Europe. The project examines how early modern European texts and images did not simply describe Eastern bodies, but choreographed them. Travel writing, missionary accounts, monster literature, and printed visual materials transformed posture, ritual gesture, dress, bodily discipline, monstrosity, sacredness, and visual arrangement into systems of moral, theological, medical, and cosmological legibility.

The research asks how foreign and Eastern bodies became readable as sacred, idolatrous, excessive, monstrous, disciplined, or redeemable within European print culture. Rather than treating corporeal difference as a stable object of representation, the project studies how European religious, medical, cosmological, and visual orders required these bodies to become evidence.