Folger Shakespeare Library, Director

Farah Karim-Cooper, PhD has been selected to serve as the Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library. 

Karim-Cooper currently serves as the Director of Education & Research at Shakespeare’s Globe and as Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Kings College London. At the Globe, she championed and created the business model for a new Research & Collections Centre that will open in 2025. She spearheaded and now serves as Co-Director of the Shakespeare Centre London, a major research partnership between Shakespeare’s Globe and King’s College London. Karim-Cooper was instrumental in returning the Globe to operations after the pandemic, as she worked in concert with leadership to re-staff and regenerate business at the Globe. Previously, she served as President of the Shakespeare Association of America from 2021-2022 after serving 5 years on their Board of Trustees. 

Karim-Cooper is a field leader in examining Shakespeare’s plays through the lens of race and social justice. In 2018, she founded and curated the Globe’s Shakespeare and Race Festival and conceived and curated the Antiracist Shakespeare Webinar series from 2021-2024. She is an executive board member for RaceB4Race, a consortium of scholars and institutions working on issues of race in premodern literature, history, and culture. In the UK, she founded the first ever Early Modern Scholars of Colour network.

Karim-Cooper holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from Royal Holloway, University of London, and received a B.A. in English Literature from California State University, Fullerton. She has published more than 40 chapters in books, reviews, and articles, and is a co-General Editor for Arden’s Shakespeare in the Theatre series and their Critical Intersections Series. She has published several books on Shakespeare, theatre, performance, and culture, including Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama (Edinburgh University Press, 2006, revised ed. 2019) and The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch and the Spectacle of Dismemberment (Arden, 2016). Her most recent book, The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race (2023), was voted a top book of 2023 by Time Magazine, NPR, and The New Yorker. In addition, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment with Christie Carson (Cambridge University Press, 2008), Shakespeare’s Theatres and Effects of Performance with Tiffany Stern (Arden, 2012), and Moving Shakespeare Indoors: Performance and Repertoire in the Jacobean Playhouse with Andrew Gurr (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Karim-Cooper has also edited a collection of essays for Arden, Titus Andronicus: The State of Play (2019), and edited the text of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi for the Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama, collated by Jeremy Lopez (2020). 

Read the full announcement here. 

Lisa Savereid and Claire Hennessey led this search with Emily Willis and Christina Errico.