To Hear Her Speak

Recovers a previously hidden theater and performance history of Black women engaging with Shakespeare as actors, playwrights, costume designers, and directors.

This catalog documents and expands on the Folger Shakespeare Library’s 2026 exhibition To Hear Her Speak: Black Women and Shakespeare, curated by Dr. Patricia Akhimie, the Director of the Folger Institute and an internationally recognized scholar in the field of premodern critical race studies. To Hear Her Speak explores the presence of Black women in the early modern world, the histories of Black women in Shakespearean performance both on and off stage, and how Black women as writers, thinkers, and artists have utilized Shakespeare's language, forms, stories, and characters for their own purposes and to diverse ends. Akhimie shares how these women, their histories, and their cultures are represented (and misrepresented) through the eyes of early modern European artists and writers, and allows readers to listen for and learn from the voices of Black women in a wide variety of forms of expression.

Patricia Akhimie curated the exhibit To Hear Her Speak: Black Women and Shakespeare. She is director of The Folger Institute in Washington, DC, and associate professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark. She serves on the executive board of RaceB4Race and is director of the RaceB4Race Mentorship Network. She is the author of Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World, whichhas been profiled as one of the books that “binds the field together” in Shakespeare Quarterly.