A continuation of the year-long celebration of the 400th anniversary of the publication of Shakespeare’s First Folio, this in-person event will coincide with the publication of “The Four Shakespeare Folios, 1623–2023: Copy, Print, Paper, Type,” edited by Dr. Sam Lemley, Curator of Special Collections. Featuring a panel of several of the book's contributors, this event will offer another in-depth look at Shakespeare’s work and contributions to society at large. A moderated Q&A will follow the presentations with a light reception afterwards. One copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio will also be on display during the event.

REGISTER: cmu.is/book-launch

Questions? Contact ul-libraries-events@andrew.cmu.edu.

Speakers

Claire M. L. Bourne is associate professor of English at The Pennsylvania State University, where she teaches and writes about early modern literature, book history, and textual editing. She is author of Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England (2020) and co-author of "'thy unvalued Booke': John Milton's Copy of the Shakespeare First Folio" (2022). She is currently editing Henry the Sixth, Part 1, for The Arden Shakespeare, Fourth Series.

Samuel V. Lemley is Curator of Special Collections in Carnegie Mellon University Libraries. His research has appeared in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, The Library, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Studies in Bibliography, and other journals.

Zachary Lesser is the Edward W. Kane Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. A general editor of the Arden Shakespeare, 4th series, for which he is editing Macbeth, Lesser is the author of Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes: Shakespeare in 1619, Bibliography in the Longue Durée (2021), Hamlet After Q1: An Uncanny History of the Shakespearean Text (2015), and Renaissance Dramaand the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade (2004). He is the co-creator of two online resources for the study of early printed drama: DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks (with Alan B. Farmer) and the Shakespeare Census (with Adam Hooks).

Christopher N. Warren is Professor of English with a courtesy appointment in History at Carnegie Mellon University. He is PI of the NEH-funded digital humanities project Freedom and the Press before Freedom of the Press and co-founder of Six Degrees of Francis Bacon.

Stephen Wittek (moderator) is Associate Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University. His work lies at the intersection between early modern drama, cultural studies, and digital humanities. His most recent book is Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of Conversion (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), a close examination of Shakespeare’s engagement with the flurry of controversy and activity surrounding the concept of conversion in post-Reformation England. He is also the author of The Media Players: Shakespeare, Middleton, Jonson, and the Idea of News (University of Michigan Press in 2015), a study of the coevolutionary relationship between the commercial news market and the commercial theater, and directs the Shakespeare-VR project.