A List
2/21/05

SLU PROFESSOR AWARDED GRANT TO STUDY AT FOLGER LIBRARY

CANTON – St. Lawrence University Piskor Professor of English Thomas L. Berger 
has been awarded a fellowship allowing him to conduct research at the Folger 
Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., for the 2005-2006 academic year. The 
fellowship, provided to the Folger by the National Endowment for the Humanities, 
provides a stipend of up to $40,000.
	With a colleague, Sonia Massai, of King's College, University of 
London, Berger will work on a project titled "Paratextual Materials in Early 
Modern Printed Drama to the Restoration." The research will result in a book 
that will be the first edition to provide full transcriptions of all 
paratextual materials included in the single-volume and collected editions of 
A Bibliography of English Printed Drama to the Restoration.
	Editions of some 836 plays written between 1475 and 1660 were printed 
in English, according to Berger, and include works by William Shakespeare, 
Ben Jonson and Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. The "paratext" includes 
the titles, dedications, prologues, epilogues, publishers' notes and other 
information that has not heretofore been gathered in one volume for scholars' 
use. "Lack of a comprehensive, scholarly edited reference source has 
prevented scholars from placing these best-known examples in a wider 
literary and cultural context," according to Berger.
	Berger, who received the J. Calvin Keene Award in 2000, has been 
a member of the faculty since 1971. A graduate of Dartmouth College, with a 
master's degree and Ph.D. from Duke University, he is a well-known 
Shakespearian scholar, editor and bibliographer. Berger regularly reviews 
books on Shakespeare, his contemporaries and his times for Shakespeare 
Quarterly, and he is general editor of the Globe Quarto Editions, a series 
of modernized editions of plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries. In addition, 
Berger is the United States secretary of the Malone Society, for whom he 
has prepared facsimile editions of the first quartos of Henry IV, Part Two 
and A Midsummer Night's Dream.
 
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