PhD, English, University of Cambridge, 2019
MA, Shakespeare Studies, King’s College London/Shakespeare’s Globe, 2014
BA, Drama, Tufts University, 2009
My name is Molly Yarn. I am a book historian and theatre practitioner researching women editors of Shakespeare in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My monograph, Shakespeare’s ‘Lady Editors’: A New History of the Shakespearean Text, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2021/2. In 2022-23, I will be a long-term fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago, with additional fellowships at the Beinecke Library and the Houghton Library, researching for my new book on women printers in London during the English civil wars and interregnum.
I currently curate the digital presence of the Rasmussen-Hines Collection of rare books, soon to be a library. I am the US Representative of the Malone Society and a co-editor of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s revised edition of the Complete Works (Bloomsbury, 2022), a role focused on preparing annotations regarding performance. I am also a freelance editor and indexer.
During my time in professional theatre, I’ve worked with or interned for Theatre for a New Audience, Jermyn Street Theatre (London), American Repertory Theatre (Boston), Williamstown Theatre Festival, the Cambridge Arts Theatre, and Shakespeare in the Park (NYC), among others. During my time at Cambridge, in addition to my academic work, I became the president of the Marlowe Society, which produced such seminal British theatre practitioners as Peter Hall, Trevor Nunn, Ian McKellen, and Tom Hiddleston, just to name a few. Additionally, I headed up a team of international scholars writing explanatory glosses to accompany Jermyn Street Theatre’s Sonnet Project, running during the pandemic shutdown. From March until August, a different actor read a new sonnet every day, and the videos were posted on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. These actors ranged from graduating drama students to celebrities such as David Suchet, Helena Bonham Carter, and Olivia Colman. (See press coverage here, here, here, and here.)
I can be reached at molly dot yarn (at) gmail dot com or on Twitter @MGYarn.