Lena Cowen Orlin came to Georgetown in the fall of 2007. From 1982 to 1996 she coordinated postdoctoral seminars and conferences at the Folger Shakespeare Library as Executive Director of the Folger Institute. From 1996 to 2007 she was Professor of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, named Presidential Research Professor in the spring of 2007. In 1996 she became Executive Director of the Shakespeare Association of America, a professional organization with about 2,000 members, and she continues in this position.

She is the author of Locating Privacy in Tudor London (Oxford, 2009) and Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England (Cornell, 1994). Her edited volumes include A Sourcebook for English Studies: The Renaissance (2009), Shakespeare without Boundaries: Essays in Honor of Dieter Mehl (with Christa Jansohn and Stanley Wells, 2010), Staging Shakespeare: Essays in Honor of Alan C. Dessen (with Miranda Johnson-Haddad, 2007), Center or Margin: Revisions of the English Renaissance in Honor of Leeds Barroll (2006), New Casebooks Othello: Contemporary Critical Essays (2003), Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide (with Stanley Wells, 2003), Material London, ca. 1600 (2000), and Elizabethan Households: An Anthology (1995).

For her interdisciplinary research into the material culture of private life in Shakespeare´s time she has traveled throughout Great Britain studying historic houses and exploring manuscript archives for legal records, property documents, and family papers from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She has been invited to speak as a Shakespearean at the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft in Weimar; as a historian for the Mackay Lecture Series at Dalhousie University and at the Warburg Institute in London; and as an art historian at the University of Nebraska School of Architecture. She has delivered the Annual Phyllis Rackin Lecture at the University of Pennsylvania (2007), the Annual Collins Lecture at the University of Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies (2008), and the Annual Patrides Lecture at the University of York (2011).

She has been awarded major research fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a Folger Shakespeare Library residency (2011-2012), the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2002-2003), and the National Endowment for the Humanities (2000-2001 and 1989-1990). She has also held residential fellowships at the Bogliasco Foundation’s Liguria Study Center, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study Center, the Yale Center for British Art, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art (US), and the Huntington Library.

She serves on the Editorial Boards of the journals Shakespeare Studies (US) and Shakespeare Survey (UK), the Executive Committee for the International Shakespeare Conference of the University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon, and the Executive Committee of the International Shakespeare Association.