The Rev. Hilary Bogert-Winkler, assistant professor of Liturgy at the School of Theology, has been awarded a fellowship from the Folger Institute. Her project, "Phillip O'Sullivan Beare's Zoilomastix: A Critical English Translation and Digital Edition," takes as its starting point a 17th-century Latin work of Irish Counter-Reformation polemic by O'Sullivan Beare for which there is not a full English translation, and yet which provides important insights into the political and religious history of Early Modern Ireland. Working with colleagues Brendan Kane (History, University of Connecticut) and Joseph McAlhany (History, University of Connecticut), this project will not only provide such a translation, but will create a digital edition and critical apparatus that will give the reader the chance to go deeper into the text through information about the geographical, historical, political, and religious contexts of the work.
The Folger Institute has a long tradition of funding research fellowships at the Folger Shakespeare Library. The library, which opened in 1932, offered its first fellowships in 1935; the current, more extensive, and more senior fellowships initiative had its start in 1984. The Fellowships Program has grown through the continued generosity of organizations such as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council on Learned Societies. Folger fellowships also draw from dedicated endowments built up over decades of support.
Prior to her arrival in Sewanee, Bogert-Winkler served as director of pastoral studies at Montreal Diocesan Theological College and was affiliate faculty in the School of Religious Studies at McGill University. She studied history and religious studies as an undergraduate at Western Kentucky University, after which she attended Harvard Divinity School and Yale Divinity School for her seminary education. She was raised up for the priesthood in the Diocese of Kentucky, and upon ordination served at both the parish and diocesan levels in the Diocese of Western Massachusetts, focusing primarily on youth ministry. While in New England, she completed her Ph.D. in history at the University of Connecticut. Her academic interests lie in the ways politics and religion intersected in early modern Britain and Ireland, particularly in how those intersections showed up in the liturgy.