Katharine Cognard-Black, is a PhD student specializing in early modern literature. One of the 2025-26 Gillespie Curatorial Fellows in Shakespeare and the Book, she is particularly interested in Shakespeare studies, feminist and queer adaptations of Shakespeare, and editorial histories.
What interested you in the Gillespie Curatorial Fellowship?
I have a background integrating theater and English studies, and Shakespeare has always been a nexus of those two things for me. This fellowship was an opportunity to dive into the extensive collection held at the Kinney Center and the amazing Gillespie Collection, which has a rich trove of first printings of Shakespeare’s plays. That opportunity to get to work with those materials, particularly as a first-year PhD, to orient myself to the resources available here, and to get in on the ground floor and see what we had was fascinating to me.
I also am really interested in developing my skills as a curator. Getting to think in a different mindset about material that I was already familiar with as a scholar and theatre practitioner, I was able to take some of these ideas that I had and figure out how to transform them into a curatorial project. I'm inspired by the work of the Folger Shakespeare Theater and Library, which is both a theater and an archive. The Folger blends public humanities with scholarly research and with theater, and all of those enrich and inform one another. As somebody who had experience as a scholar, writer, researcher, and theater practitioner, I wanted experience and skill as a curator, thinking about how curational projects inform my other work, and how does that other work then inform my curation?
Can you tell me about your exhibit?
My exhibit, “Shakespeare’s Stopped Mouths,” builds on research I did for my master's thesis; I was captivated by one phrase — “to stop a mouth” — because of its wide range of meanings. If you say, “stop my mouth,” you can be asking for a kiss. Or if somebody says, “I will stop your mouth,” they could be kissing you, but this phrase can also refer to physical silencing and murder. I was interested in this phrase's range of potential applications, both as literature and as dramatic texts. What is that action doing, and what is the meaning of that? In particular, I was interested in the way that women's mouths are stopped and the gendered mechanics of silencing at play.
I explored three plays and the mouth-stopping of three women in these plays — Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, a comedy; Lavinia in Titus Andronicus, a tragedy; and Katherine in Henry V, a history. In each case I was interested in the gendered power dynamics at play, of who is being silenced, and who is doing the silencing.
How did the Gillespie Collection inform your exhibit?
I was also tracking the history of editorial bias. For Much Ado About Nothing, in 1733, an editor changes who says one of these lines and also changes it from a more potentially ambiguous meaning to a kiss. So we have an entirely different and dramatically revised ending of this play. It's a play that's quite popular, and the ending that is so popular is not in the first folio. I was able to see what these first printings look like, and then ask what I think about that change, where does editorial bias lie, why was it changed, what would it mean if it weren't changed?
Did this fellowship inform your research or make you think about future research in a different way?
Certainly. This fellowship was incredibly pertinent to my work as a scholar and theatre practitioner and has dramatically shifted how I'm thinking about editorial histories and performance implications. I am now re-envisioning as a director, how I might stage the end of this play. Thinking as a curator was an invaluable and instructive experience in considering how to tell the scope of this story, and how to introduce an audience to a text. You're only going to see one page of a book; you're not going to be able to read the whole play in the exhibition space.
As somebody interested in public humanities and making research and resources available, this was a foundational experience for learning about the Gillespie Collection, the Kinney Center, and the community — going to events, getting to work with and see the work of the Renaissance of the Earth Fellows, and building amazing relationships with surrounding colleges. All of that was foundational to how I imagine myself continuing to do research here at UMass.
What advice do you have for graduate students who want to get involved in public scholarship?
Do it! The biggest thing that I could say is get involved; make that a priority. Sometimes we are so invested in our own research, and there's definitely a tendency to drill down and focus in. When you're so immersed in your own world of ideas, public scholarship is a wonderful opportunity to re-evaluate the stakes of your work and to interrogate how and why is this important? How and why is this useful? What impact might this have? Why is this important, not just to me?
Those questions prompted more thought on how I am thinking about the language of resistance in a project that is so interested in silencing, and particularly living through a cultural climate that is preoccupied with the enforced silencing of people. How is this research thinking about ideas that are urgent and present? How can I share that with a group of people, start those conversations, and open up these ideas to show the lineage of silencing, the ways in which silencing is enforced, and how that is still relevant today? This was a fantastic opportunity to interrogate my own research and consider the best way to make it accessible and available to the public.