Folger Salon with Austin Anderson, Joaquín Molina, and Alice Wickenden

Transatlantic Choreographies of the Carved Gourd: Influence, and Material Culture in the Early Andean (New) World
2026-27 Folger Institute Fellow

Originally from Chile, Joaquín Molina is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology of the Americas at the University of Bonn, Germany. He holds an M.A. in Art Theory and History and a B.A. in Hispanic Language and Literature, both from the University of Chile. His research interests include the biographies of objects and their transcontinental diaspora, Andean ontology, and the analysis of Indigenous aesthtical phenomena.

Theatre and the Extra-Illustrated Book: Participatory Reading and Fandoms in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century England
2026-27 Folger Institute Fellow

Jane Wessel is an associate professor of English, specializing in eighteenth-century British literature and theatre history. She has particular interests in celebrity, book history, and the intersections of literature and law. Her first book, Owning Performance | Performing Ownership: Literary Property and the Eighteenth-Century British Stage (University of Michigan Press, 2022), examines the attempts of playwrights, actors, and theatre managers to “own” the ephemeral and unfixed performance of their plays in the era before legal protection for performance. Her current book project, Theatre and the Extra-Illustrated Book, extends this interest in ownership. But rather than focusing on ownership in a legal sense, this project considers battles over the “ownership” of shared cultural knowledge. Taking the extra-illustrated theatre book as its focus, this project maps the ways fans participated in constructing the biographies of their favorite performers.

Provenance: Early Modern Books and their Afterlives
2026-27 Folger Institute Fellow

I am a book historian and literary scholar, primarily of the early modern period. My current work is interested in the concept of provenance and how it affects collections of early modern books. I ask how libraries understand their own legacies, how they work to produce new forms of knowledge, and how this might allow us to interrogate our own digital, pedagogical, and institutional engagements with rare books. I am particularly interested in what it means for institutions to own and use books that have ‘difficult’ provenances, and what it means for these owner’s names to be perpetuated through library infrastructures; at the Folger, I will be looking at the entanglements between Henry Folger’s oil work and his library’s legacy.