VOE Highley YouTube
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Christopher Highley: I think even students who come into the course and say they're intimidated by Shakespeare, they're just drawn to Shakespeare, even though he might be a bit scary. And once I tell them at the beginning of the semester that, yeah, Shakespeare is scary, but let's embrace the fear. 

Jen Farmer: From the heart of the Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host, David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work of Arts and Sciences faculty and staff. With departments as wide ranging as Art, Astronomy, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Physics, Emergent Materials and Mathematics and Languages, among many others, the College always has something exciting happening.

Join us to find out what's new, now.



David Staley: I am so pleased to welcome into the ASC Marketing and Communication Studio today, Chris Highley, Professor of English and Director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at The Ohio State University College of the Arts and Sciences. He specializes in early modern literature, culture, and history, and works on early modern London, as well as on the posthumous image of Henry VIII.

He is an editorial board member of _The Map of Early Modern London_. Dr. Highley, welcome to Voices. 

Christopher Highley: Yeah, thanks for having me, David, it's great to be here. 

David Staley: I would very much like to begin by talking about your most recent book, _Blackfriars in Early Modern London_. Please tell us, what did you argue in the book, what were your findings? 

Christopher Highley: Right, so, that book took about ten years to complete, you know, all of the research, going to archives in London, obviously, doing a lot of digging in manuscript archives, legal records, property records. And it sort of grew out of my dual interest in theatre, in the theatre of Shakespeare's day, early modern drama, and in urban history, in the history of London in the 16th and 17th centuries, London, you know, sort of between the Reformation in the early 16th century and the Great Fire of London at the end of the 17th century. And for many years, I've actually been teaching a course on what I call "Shakespeare's London", both through the English Department and through the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and obviously I've been teaching lots of Shakespeare classes and early modern drama courses. So, I thought a book that studies a particular, sort of really defined location in London which was also the site of an important theater, would just be able to indulge all of my interests and curiosity there.

David Staley: Is that what Blackfriars refers to? 

Christopher Highley: Right. So, you can go to Blackfriars today, Blackfriars is right in the center of London. It's part of the ancient city inside the Roman walls, the one square mile, so we need to understand that the actual City of London with a capital "C" is sort of the Roman

encampment, parts of the wall are still visible. Blackfriars was in the, is in the south west corner, so it's partly bounded by the old wall on the west, the River Thames bounds it on the south. And then, if you look north from Blackfriars, you see St. Paul's Cathedral. So it's very, very much in the center of things.

It's not really on the tourist map anymore. You know, there's a lot of businesses, high tech firms there, but there are some sort of fragments of what used to be there. So, Blackfriars refers to the Dominican friars, the order of preachers who established a great priory or friary there in the 13th century.

It was a thriving religious center, but of course, London before the Reformation was, you know, really cluttered with religious houses, priories, monasteries, convents, and other religious institutions. But at the Reformation, you know, when Henry VIII dispossesses, the church, Blackfriars property, the land, all the wealth is taken, seized by the crown and then redistributed or sold.

Henry, gives some of the land and property to friends, other parts of it are sold. And eventually, in the 1570s, enterprising sort of theatrical business people get the idea of establishing an indoor theater in part of the old, what's called the western range of the friary on an upper floor. So, this would be where a great chamber had once been. It was actually used for meetings of Parliament, the divorce trial of Catherine of Aragon from Henry the Eighth partly took place in this space; this is in the earlier 16th century, but by the 1570s, this space has been converted into apartments, tenements, mansion houses. And then, as I said, these enterprising sort of impresarios, theatrical businessmen, decide to reconvert the space one more time into a small playhouse that becomes the first Blackfriars Theatre.

There are actually two theatres on the site. 

David Staley: You talked about lots of, well, at least at one time, lots of religious houses there in London. did the same go with theatres? Were there lots of theatres or is this - 

Christopher Highley: No. 

David Staley: - this unusual? 

Christopher Highley: Right, this is unusual. Theater had always been, and it was often been sponsored by the church, had been religious theater, and it had tended to coincide with religious holidays and feast days. Theater would often be performed in church yards or even in churches - this is before the Reformation. Secular theater there would be performed typically in inn yards, 

David Staley: Inn yards?

Christopher Highley: Right, so, coaching inns, so basically like hotels, what we might call hotels with restaurants, catering facilities where you could stay and there'd be stables for the horses and there'd be sort of an open courtyard in the middle, but in that open space, you could erect a kind of a makeshift stage. People could pay, because there would be galleries, one upper level gallery around the four sides of the courtyard, people could pay and watch from there. So, it was sort of makeshift. If it wasn't sponsored by the church, if it wasn't a miracle play or a mystery play, as these religious cycle plays were called, the plays tended to be rather makeshift. But then, in the 1570s, we get the first purpose built theatres in London, built north of the city. Very first is actually called The Theatre. Then another one springs up next to it called The Curtain, and that's not a reference to a theatrical curtain on the stage, it's the name of the property it's built on, it's called The Curtain.

And these are north of the city, and then, after that, then more and more theatres start springing up, especially on the south of London, on what we call the Bankside, that's where The Globe is which has been rebuilt now, and you can visit, see plays there in this sort of replica of Shakespeare's Globe. There's many other amphitheaters like The Rose, The Hope, The Fortune on the bank side. The Blackfriars Theatre, these indoor theaters were much smaller in terms of audience capacity than the outdoor public amphitheaters. The indoor theaters could hold two or three hundred people where the outdoor amphitheaters could hold three thousand.

So the idea was that, being an indoor space, it would be more comfortable, you'd be protected from the elements. It would be a smaller auditorium, but you would charge a lot more. And these first indoor playhouses, there was one in the Blackfriars, there was another indoor playhouse, very small, built into the structure of St.

Paul's Cathedral. I mean, literally just a walk from from the Blackfriars. There was a space, and there weren't adults performing, there weren't male professional actors performing in these indoor theatres, there were actually children, prepubescent boys for the most part who were choristers.

So, they were attached to St. Paul's Cathedral, that they were the choristers of Paul's, right, who would perform even song and perform in the liturgy. Their master, their pedagogue had the idea of having them perform secular plays and charging money.

And so, I think the first Blackfriars Theatre was installed sort of as a response to this little theatre just up the road at St. Paul's Cathedral. And then later on in the 1590s is when Shakespeare enters the picture and it's what we refer to as the second Blackfriars Theatre.

It's on the same upper story of the Blackfriars Western Range, part of this old great parliamentary chamber but in a slightly different location. And now we have not boys, but adult professional actors performing there and Shakespeare's writing plays for the company and of course the great actor and friend of Shakespeare and co sharer in his theatrical company is Richard Burbage.

And basically, Shakespeare's company, which at first they're known as the Chamberlain's Men, the Lord Chamberlain is their patron, and then after 1603 King James becomes the monarch and he takes over the Chamberlain's Men, he makes them the King's Men. So, they've sort of got this royal imprimatur and authority now and they're in residence in the Blackfriars from around 1608 to the closing of the theatres in 1642, and I should add that the King's Men are sort of the preeminent company of their day, and they have two theatres, and this is really unique in the theatrical scene, so they have their indoor theatre at Blackfriars where they'll perform in the winter and then during inclement weather, and then they'll move in spring to the Globe on Bankside, and they'll be there spring and summer. That's the typical sort of rotation. 

David Staley: You said that Blackfriars is no longer on the tourist map. Why is that? 

Christopher Highley: Oh, that's a good question. I think partly because, I mean, we're talking about an eight acre space here.

It's tiny. I figured out it's approximately the size of the oval at OSU. That's the footprint of what is a - it's a parish, right? It's a civic parish, St. Anne's Blackfriars, that's the name of the church there, St. Anne's. It's also what's known as a precinct or a liberty, but the footprint is about eight acres.

And nowadays... well, first of all, the city Shakespeare knew was destroyed in the Great Fire of London, and then it's just been built over. The Times publishers, the Great Times of London, they used to have their headquarters of their manufacturing plants in the Blackfriars before they moved out east to the Docklands, and now it's just mostly modern buildings, hotels, huge train station. And there are plaques, and if you've ever wandered around the streets of London, you'll notice the blue plaques. So, you'll see - 

David Staley: Like historical markers. 

Christopher Highley: Historical markers, exactly. So there's a blue plaque showing us where the monastery generally was situated. There's another blue plaque that marks the approximate site of a building that Shakespeare purchased.

He purchased part of the Eastern Gatehouse, which is intriguing for Shakespeareans, because Shakespeare never before had actually owned property in the city, even though he'd worked there all his adult life. He'd always been a renter, and we've got records of him renting property as a lodger, basically, in different parts of London, but sort of towards the end of his career he went in and bought part of this gatehouse in Blackfriars and there's a lot of theories about, you know, why he did that and it's a very complex conveyancing situation.

There's nothing else really for tourists to see; the closest tourists will come is in St. Paul's Cathedral. But if you like wandering down little alleyways and seeing remnants, fragments of old church charge, which still survive, then, it's a place for you.

And I always take my students there when I go do a study abroad. We do a day walking Shakespeare's London, and instead of, you know, going to the Globe Theatre on Bankside where there's obviously the replica of the theatre, there's a museum there, there's lots of historical markers.

That's very well documented, that's where all the tourists go, but there's so much to talk about in relation to Blackfriars, so we wander around. And what's very interesting is that after the Great Fire, there were all these grandiose plans to redesign London and to have sort of a very regular, symmetrical street pattern, so, it might be more like Paris or a great European city. That never happened, those plans were never realized, and so, Old London was sort of built along the same lines, so, the same property lines continued to exist, the same little alleyways, the same little yards, courtyards. So, when you go there now to Blackfriars and if you carry around, say, a 17th century pre fire map, you can see very little has changed in terms of the actual topography of this eight acre site.

David Staley: Well, we should talk more about topography. I know you are part of an NEH funded research project called Shakespeare's Theaterscape, and I'd like you to tell us more about this project. 

Christopher Highley: Okay, so this is sort of taking my interest in urban topography and the built environment of early modern London online and using GIS resources and geo referencing resources.

So, this is a collaborative project, and our principal investigator is Professor Paul White, who teaches at Purdue, and the website is currently hosted there. We have another professor, Chris Matusiak, who teaches at Ithaca College in the U.S., and then our third expert researcher is Callan Davies, who teaches in England at the University of Southampton, and each of us is responsible for a theater district. So, obviously, I'm doing Blackfriars, Callan is doing the Curtain Theatre up north in Shoreditch, Chris Matusiak is doing the Cockpit Theatre to the west of the city, and then Paul is doing the Fortune Theatre to the north up in a parish called St. Giles Cripplegate. And what we're trying to do is to sort of recreate, in as much detail as possible, the streets and the area immediately around each theatre so that we can get a sense of what other institutions, what other businesses, residences, the theatres were interacting with.

Theatres are very much part of a community and dependent upon other institutions, organisations, and businesses, okay? And so our base map is a 17th century map, the most accurate map that we have of what we think London would have been like in around... 1616 is what we're calling our anchor date for various reasons - and then we build on this 17th century map, we add details that we're discovering about properties, buildings, lanes, alleyways, courtyards, any other sort of physical features, natural features, or other features in the built environment. We're finding these in documentary evidence, like deeds, leases, wills, parish records, legal documents.

I've done a lot of this work over the last ten years, but there's more to find out , there is more there to discover, even with Blackfriars. We're superimposing what we discover on the 17th century map, and then everything is going to be geo referenced to a database where we enter information about major events in our districts that are related to the theaters.

We have major places, we have people, and we have documents, so that in the final version of this online mapping project, someone will be able to go in and say they go to the Blackfriars and they're looking at the map, it's gonna be highly interactive, so they might see that there's a building marked and the name pops up and it says the tennis courts, just a hundred yards or so from the theater.

And if you click on tennis courts, you will get a modern narrative, but written by me, about what these tennis courts are. That'll be linked to primary documents, deeds, and other documents, right? Actual, handwritten manuscripts that we've then transcribed that can be searched, and there'll be an essay sort of talking about the connection between the tennis courts and the theater and the church, which is just nearby, and it'll talk about sort of the role of pastimes and leisure activities in this particular part of London and how we might actually conceptualize it, not just as a theater district, but as kind of a leisure district more generally. And we'll talk about who had access to these tennis courts, who had access to the bowling alleys, which we've discovered again through legal documents, mostly, were located very close to the theater, but tended to attract a different clientele than the tennis courts. So, we're building up this kind of thick description off the neighborhood, it's institutions, it's people, and getting a sense of what everyday lived experience was like around the theater and how the theater wasn't just a sort of an isolated self contained entity. It was very much part of this living community. 

David Staley: So, given your book, given _Blackfriars in Early Modern London_, given the Shakespeare's Theaterscape Project: would you think of yourself as an historical geographer? 

Christopher Highley: I like that term. I don't describe myself like that, but I think, yeah, it's one of the areas that I'm definitely interested in.

I am an English professor, my bread and butter is teaching Shakespeare, teaching drama. But, I have been mistaken for a historian at conferences. I'm always really, really flattered about that because I love the history of the period as much as I love the literature, but I couldn't do without the literature, and so, in all of my, whatever I write, whatever I research, all my teaching, I try to be as interdisciplinary as possible. But what's funny about the history part of this, if I could just kind of wander back into my childhood a bit, is that I didn't even take history O level at school. That means, when you're in the English system in the 1970s, I had to choose when I was about 13 between geography and history.

I'll always remember this, and I chose geography, partly I think because my brother in law was a geography teacher. Didn't do history, never did any, so I've no formal qualifications in history. So everything that I've learned, I've been pretty much self taught. And I did have the opportunity, when I was in grad school, I was doing my PhD in English focused on Shakespeare and drama, but I did have chance to take a couple of courses in the history department at Stanford with a professor who specialized in early modern London and wrote wonderful books about Puritan London, edited the diary of 17th century Puritan artisan and published that. And this was really the beginning of my interest in the city and just seeing how fascinating it was as a place and all the different levels of archives and documentation that you could explore.

And although the professor in question, he was a man named Professor Paul Seaver is no longer with us, unfortunately, but I don't think he'll ever know, he never did know what a profound influence he sort of had on my career in academia. So yeah, everything I've learned about the history in this period has been pretty much, you know, self taught or just serendipitous taking courses like this. 

David Staley: You talk about teaching Shakespeare. So Shakespeare's still popular with students, is he? 

Christopher Highley: Oh, yeah, very much so. Shakespeare never seems to go out of fashion. And we have a major course on Shakespeare for English majors, we have a special topics course on Shakespeare, so I've taught Shakespeare's comedies, Shakespeare's history plays, courses on Shakespeare and politics, Shakespeare and history. But we also have like a general education undergraduate Shakespeare course, and traditionally those courses have always enrolled 40 students, even 45 students.

I think even students who come into the course and say they're intimidated by Shakespeare, they're just drawn to Shakespeare, even though he might be a bit scary. And once I tell them at the beginning of the semester that, yeah, Shakespeare is scary, but let's embrace the fear, anyone's got a "No Fear Shakespeare" with them, let's throw it out of the window right now, because we're going to read real Shakespeare. So, we do have fun with Shakespeare, you know, because he is such an iconic sort of superhuman figure that you have to sort of, I try to deflate that idea of the great bard, bring him down to Earth.

It has to be taught the right way, obviously. As a teacher, you just have to be enthusiastic and to love what you're teaching, to communicate that to the students. We do a lot of reading aloud in class, we do group readings, and the classes are very, very interactive so students can ask a lot of questions. Funnily enough, though, I haven't taught Shakespeare in a long time, with all of this, my CMRS responsibilities, teaching courses on London. I'm also teaching courses now in popular culture in early modern England, because we have a sort of a popular culture minor in the English department.

I don't know if you're familiar with it, but, you know, we teach comics and movies and, all kinds of forms of popular culture. So, for the first time, I did something that was sort of non contemporary, I offered a course in popular culture in early modern England, managed to get Shakespeare in, of course, because that's a huge question is, was Shakespeare a popular writer?

What was his audience, who was going to plays? Who was reading, buying and reading plays? And it's really fascinating to sort of trace across the centuries how attitudes towards Shakespeare have changed, you know, how this iconic Bardic figure is very much a fairly recent invention. 

And how, even in the sort of the Victorian age, Shakespeare was part of vaudeville acts and he was adapted to popular settings.

People would just recite particular speeches by Shakespeare, you'd read Shakespeare at home as a, you know, sort of a middle class family. It's very much part of the middle class popular culture. So I really explore that in my popular culture course. 

David Staley: A moment ago you talked about study abroad programs.

Christopher Highley: Mm hmm. 

David Staley: You are the coordinator of study abroad programs at the Department of English. Tell us about, tell us about some of these courses. 

Christopher Highley: All right, so I've been teaching study abroad and coordinating the program for about twenty years, really, as long as I can remember, and I'd say that taking students, OSU students overseas has really been the highlight of my time at Ohio State.

I really love it, because it's great just to see how much the students gain from the experience, how grateful they are, just to see that so that their eyes opening with a new experience is going to different places. Many, many of our students have never left the U.S. before, some of them never even left Ohio, I think, but it's just so rewarding for the students, and enriching, and it'll stay with them for the rest of their lives and also enriching for me.

So, the English department, we've had various study abroad programs. Originally, our program was hosted at a university in the west of England in Bath, and it was taught by Bath faculty for the month. Then we went to a kind of self taught program where our own faculty, one faculty member, would take the students and teach in London for the month, and that's pretty much what we're doing now. So, in the Next May, I'm hoping to teach with a colleague, Professor Zach Hines on the Lima campus, on the regional campus, we're going to co teach a course. We're calling it Walking and Reading Literary London, which will be not just about, you know, Shakespeare and that period, but about representations of London, be about works set in London, Holmes, Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle, Dickens, modern writers. We're going to do a whole range, but we're going to organize the course so that the places we're reading about we'll be able to visit in some way. So, for instance, we'll do Keats. John Keats' "Ode on the Nightingale" and we'll go up to Hampstead Heath and we'll go to the Keats house and we'll see what was the inspiration for this poem.

So, really try and connect the locations with the readings. What I like about these courses is this experiential learning, we're not really in the classroom much. We do have access to a classroom spaces, but I try and get out on the street as much as possible. Get out, walking places and and sort of just talking with the students as we go or stopping and having like little mini conversations and lectures at interesting stopping points or in museums or sites of interest, and I think the students really get a lot out of that. And they're journaling a lot, they're taking photographs, we do group assignments. So, last May, for instance, the students were put into small groups and they were each asked to choose a more obscure museum in London, because there are literally hundreds of museums within a five mile radius of the center of London.

So, I think some of them went to the Dickens Museum, others went to the Handel Museum. There's many medical museums, Museum of the Royal Surgeons, things like this. So, it's not all sort of top down learning, the students are doing a lot of things independently.

And they do, they get a tremendous sense of agency and independence by the end of the four weeks. And of course, very, very few of them want to come home. So yeah, it's really, I think it's a life changing experience for them and, as a faculty member, you know, to see that is just so rewarding.

David Staley: Tell us a little about the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. We've talked a little bit about it here, give us a little sense of the mission of the center. 

Christopher Highley: Right. Well, we're really trying to, you know, foster and encourage research about interest in enthusiasm for the whole sort of medieval, early modern renaissance period.

So, you know, several centuries, we cover the globe. We're not Eurocentric, we're not just about England or France. We try to be as sort of all inclusive not just in our historical range, but in our geographical range as well. So, we don't actually have our own faculty, we have faculty whose home bases are in the English department, or history, or East Asian, or art history, you know, they come from all over the, mostly the College of Arts and Sciences and they teach courses for us.

And I think probably the most gratifying part of the job is being able to bring in outside speakers. So, we'll bring in speakers from other universities to talk, we'll have an annual symposium on a different topic each year, which I'll ask the advisory committee for input and we'll, come up with a topic.

So, this coming February, 2025, our topic is the "blue humanities". 

David Staley: The blue humanities? 

Christopher Highley: So, also known sometimes as the maritime humanities. So, all things... 

David Staley: Something like oceans? 

Christopher Highley: Exactly. All things to do with the oceans, seas. So this includes not just sort of travel and exploration, but we have people talking about medieval shipwrecks and how you engage with newly discovered wrecks these days, you know, what's the ethical thing to do in terms of leaving them untouched or bringing parts to the surface and trying to reconstruct them.

So, we have somebody coming from East Coast to talk about that. Other people are talking about the history of medieval fisheries and different fishing patterns and how fishing consumption, the whole fishing industry is related to religious observances and how that changes across time.

And other people are talking about entertainment on board 16th century voyages, in fact, sort of the decks of ships, almost as theaters and performance of music on board ships. So yeah, it's a little kind of a section of the humanities. Historical geography's come up, the digital humanities, all of these, you know, different sort of ways of exploring the past, and we try to take full advantage of these different avenues in our talks and the symposiums we organize at CMRS.

So, in the past we've had a symposia on environmentalism in the early modern and renaissance world. We occasionally do sort of symposia based on anniversaries, so we had the anniversary of Luther's 95 Theses, that we had a big thing on the Reformation then, invited speakers in.

We also have more of a public facing outreach event we do every two years, because it's such a big event, called "Popular Culture and the Deep Past", and this usually takes place in the Union over two days. We do have academic talks, but we also have exhibitions and we have sort of performances.

So February 2024, our theme for that was games and pastimes in the medieval and Renaissance world. So, we had fencing exhibitions, we had falcon... 

David Staley: Fencing, sword fights?, 

Christopher Highley: Yeah, by a historical fencing group in Columbus. We had a local falconer come, who's sort of an expert on medieval techniques for hunting with birds and taking care of birds.

It's fantastic, it's on the Oval, there's these huge birds flying around on the Oval in midwinter. And this is very much ,we're trying to reach a broader public to bring people in and let them know what we're doing, because I think, you know, it's not just a small group of academics who are interested in medieval and renaissance things, I mean, there's so much popular culture in our own time with, you know, _Game of Thrones_ and all of these historical themed, you know, documentaries or miniseries that draw on medieval and renaissance themes and tropes that are sort of out there, generally. So, we see that there's a really huge appetite for this kind of thing.

David Staley: Tell us what's next for your research. 

Christopher Highley: Well, the mapping Shakespeare's Theaterscape is really a long, a long term project. We have money for a couple more years from the NEH, but after that, I'm hoping to take it to a new level and start developing three dimensional models, digital models, of parts of these theater districts that you could, you know, sort of virtually walk around and interact with.

And then using that as a, platform for building in all kinds of teaching opportunities so that students could sort of create, say, their own interior of the Blackfriars Theatre, making different decisions on, you know, which document to base their reconstruction on. Because one of the things to stress is that although we do have hundreds of primary documents helping us to reconstruct these places, there's still a lot we don't know, and we never will know. And so, part of reconstructing any historical site has to include sort of informed speculation. So, it's a process of, when we're recreating these spaces, what we call is building blurry, rather than building sharply or precisely, and that that blurriness sort of draws on the fact that there are a lot of gaps and there's lots of ambiguity in the evidence, but that's an opportunity, then, for students to theorize and speculate using the documentary evidence we do have over what a space might have looked like, what it might have sounded like, what the acoustics might have been like inside an indoor playhouse, what the lighting might have been like, all kinds of things.

So anyway, that's sort of a later iteration of the mapping project. And then I'm also interested in parishes, especially urban parishes in the early modern world, more generally. And I have a kind of project on the back burner that I'm calling the "Staging the Parish on the Early Modern Stage", where I'd look at the representation of parish life in the place of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, because I think we've underestimated just how much the parish as a local unit of organization shaped people's lives in this period. And we talk a lot about the formation of the nation state in the 16th, 17th century, we talk a lot about a county societies, but most people sort of had their existence and experience life through the personnel and the institutions and the routines of the parish. So, of course, the church was central to everybody's life as churchgoing was required by state law, and the, sort of authority figures that one encountered on a daily basis were people like constables, who were appointed by the parish.

Constables, scavengers, the people who clean the streets, searchers, the people, usually poor women, widowed women who searched for and identified bodies, they had to identify whether these bodies had died of the plague; so, there's all these people sort of employed by the parish who are your neighbors who sort of define the, horizons of your world, and I'm very interested in doing this kind of micro historical work and to look at how, on stage, these kinds of authority figures, these kinds of spaces are explored.

David Staley: Chris Highley, thank you. 

Christopher Highley: Thank you very much for having me. Really enjoyed it. 

Jen Farmer: Voices of Excellence is produced and recorded at the Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences Marketing and Communications Studio. More information about the podcast and our guests can be found at go. osu. edu slash voices. Voices of Excellence is produced by Doug Dangler. I'm Jen Farmer.