Lena Cowen Orlin

Lena Cowen Orlin is Professor Emerita of English at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. She served as Executive Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library’s centre for advanced research, the Folger Institute, and as Executive Director of the Shakespeare Association of America, which holds an annual convention for Shakespeare scholars worldwide. She chairs the Board of Governors of the New Variorum Shakespeare Editions and sits on the boards of the International Shakespeare Association (headquartered at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust) and the Shakespeare Institute’s International Shakespeare Conference. She is a general editor of the Oxford Shakespeare Topics Series, the Arden Shakespeare State of Play Series, and the Arden Studies in Early Modern Material Culture Series, as well as a member of the editorial boards of the journals Shakespeare Survey and Shakespeare Studies. Lena is also an elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Corresponding Fellow of the English Association.

Her scholarship crosses the disciplines of literature, history, and art history. Work researched in the collections at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust includes the archives-based Private Life of William Shakespeare, which won the Roland Bainton Prize for Literature in 2022; The Bedford Shakespeare, an edition of Shakespeare’s plays illustrated with images from Royal Shakespeare Company productions; and the co-authored Learned Culture in Shakespeare’s Stratford: The Quiney Family and Their Books. Lena has received fellowship support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the (American) National Center for the Humanities, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the (American) National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Hagler Institute for Advanced Study, as well as grants from the British Academy, the Yale Center for British Art, and the Bellagio and Bogliasco study centers.

Lena is a Vice Chair of the SBT.