Join us for a virtual escape room with transcription experts Julie Fisher, Sara Powell, and Heather Wolfe. Using manuscripts from the Blithfield Hall collection, teams will compete to solve clues that bring the story of one of Blithfield’s past residents into sharper focus.

ADVANCE REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED. Contact Martha Howard for more information.

Julie A. Fisher holds a PhD from the University of Delaware and specializes in Early American and Native American history. She has been developing digital humanities projects over the past four years including serving as the Members Bibliography and Biography Postdoctoral Fellow at the APS and as a consulting editor with the Native Northeast Portal (formerly the Yale Indian Papers Project) at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. Before that she was the primary investigator for a National Park Service grant at the Roger Williams National Memorial in Providence, Rhode Island. She first began transcribing and learning paleography skills for her first book, Ninigret, Sachem of the Niantics and Narragansetts: Diplomacy, War, and the Balance of Power in Seventeenth-Century New England and Indian Country. She is currently working on her latest project which examines language acquisition in seventeenth century southern New England.

Sara Powell is the assistant curator of Early Books and Manuscripts at Houghton Library at Harvard University, where she supports the development and use of the library’s pre-1800 collections, with an emphasis on medieval and Renaissance manuscripts. Sara earned an MS in Library & Information Science from Simmons University and an MA in Medieval Studies from the University of York. She has previously held research librarian positions at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library and at Swarthmore College Libraries.

Heather Wolfe is Curator of Manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She received an MLIS from UCLA and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. She is currently principal investigator of Early Modern Manuscripts Online (emmo.folger.edu), co-principal investigator of Shakespeare’s World (shakespearesworld.org), curator of Shakespeare Documented (shakespearedocumented.org) and is co-director of the multi-year, $1.5 million research project Before ‘Farm to Table’: Early Modern Foodways and Cultures, a Mellon initiative in collaborative research at the Folger Institute of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Her first book, Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland: Life and Letters (2000) received the Josephine Roberts Scholarly Edition Award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. She has written widely on the intersections between manuscript and print culture in early modern England, and also edited The Trevelyon Miscellany of 1608 (2007), The Literary Career and Legacy of Elizabeth Cary (2007), and, with Alan Stewart, Letterwriting in Renaissance England (2004). Her most recent research explores the social circulation of writing paper and blank books. Her essay “The Material Culture of Record-Keeping in Early Modern England,” co-written with Peter Stallybrass, received the 2019 Archival History Article Award from the Society of American Archivists.