Department of English

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 was appointed Executive Director of the Shakespeare Association of America, a professional organization with about 1,500 members. She continues to coordinate the activities of the Shakespeare Association and to represent North American Shakespeareans on the board of the International Shakespeare Association.

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. In recent years she has been invited to speak as a Shakespearean at the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft in Weimar and the Australia and New Zealand Shakespeare Association in Brisbane; 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 and the National Portrait Gallery in London.

She has been awarded major research fellowships from 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 Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study Center, the Yale Center for British Art, the Folger Shakespeare Library, 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), as well as the MLA's New Variorum Shakespeare committee and the Short-Term Fellowships Committee for the Huntington Library.