Planning continues for our exciting place-based April 27-30, 2023 Workshop, “Gilding the Guilt: The Gilded Age, Craft Production, and the Construction of Cultural Capital,” part of the Folger Institute’s “American Regional Shakespeares” series here in Buffalo.

The workshop includes cultural tours, themed meals and receptions, and a theater practitioners’ roundtable and demonstrations of the roles of race and class in theater practice then and now. These join intensive bibliographic sessions amid the rare books collections of both the downtown Buffalo public and the SUNY at Buffalo libraries.

And we’re planning on taking the show on the road at the spring NeMLA in Niagara Falls and the summer British Shakespeare Conference on “Re-locating Shakespeare.” Come join us in a revitalized Buffalo during cherry-blossom week, and get in—in advance of our return to the Folger Shakespeare Library in 2024—on the ground floor of these renewed discussions of the role of Shakespeare in America!

Gilding the Guilt: The Gilded Age, Craft Production, and the Construction of Cultural Capital (spring weekend workshop)

Organized by Barbara Bono, Carrie Tirado Bramen, Maria Horne, and Stacy Carson Hubbard

Co-Sponsored with the Departments of English and Theatre and Dance at the University of Buffalo, and the University at Buffalo Library, and the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library

What role has “Shakespeare” played in reinforcing and contesting wealth and class, and how should scholars critically reconsider that tension at a moment when economic injustice has been so starkly underlined for all Americans? This workshop considers these questions with the case study of Buffalo, New York, a regional city situated at a geographic and historical crossroads in America. While Buffalo’s wealth and cultural opportunities were unevenly distributed, its elite’s ambitions were vast and included an aggressive practice of Gilded Age book collecting, focused on Shakespeare. Meanwhile major cultural countercurrents included the American Arts and Craft movement headquartered at the nearby Roycroft Campus. Topics to be discussed include the tensions found in late-nineteenth-century American cities during the fraught economic, industrial, and cultural expansion of the Gilded Age, especially those involving studies into non-elite acculturation through Shakespeare and other signifiers of high culture, and creative American counter-responses to European art and culture that continue to resonate today. Scholars working on these and related topics are welcome to attend.

Visit the Institute’s website for the full workshop description.

Applications are due Tuesday, November 22. Funding is available for all Folger Institute consortium affiliates.