Lunch with the Libraries & Museums - Early Marylandiana: Historic Documents from the Founding of the Old Line State

Dr. Earle Havens is Nancy H. Hall Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts, director of the Virginia Fox Stern Center for the History of the Book in the Renaissance, and an adjunct professor of modern languages and literature at Johns Hopkins University. His academic teaching and published scholarship focus on the history of the book and material texts in early modern Europe, from 1400 to 1750. 

Dr. Havens has authored, co-authored, and edited thirteen scholarly books and exhibition catalogues, and dozens of journal articles and book chapters, including Fakes, Lies, and Forgeries: Rare Books and Manuscripts from the Arthur and Janet Freeman Bibliotheca Fictiva Collection (Sheridan Libraries, 2014; 2nd ed. rev., 2016); and (with Walter Stephens, Literary Forgery in Early Modern Europe, 1450-1800 (JHU Press, 2018). He is currently co-editing several books, including with Mark Rankin, The Elizabethan Catholic Underground: Clandestine Printing and Scribal Subversion in the English Counter-Reformation (forthcoming with Brill); and with Erin Rowe and Kelsey Champagne, Women of the Book: The Spiritual Lives of Early Modern Women, 1450-1800 (forthcoming with the Pennsylvania State University Press). In Spring 2024 he once again taught his popular undergraduate seminar, “The History of Fake News from the Flood to the Apocalypse.”

Dr. Havens earned an interdisciplinary joint-PhD in Renaissance Studies and History from Yale University.

Kathryn H. Stutz earned dual Bachelor’s degrees in Classics and in Sociology & Anthropology at the University of Puget Sound in 2018. As a PhD student of Classics at Johns Hopkins since 2019, Kathryn has been investigating the uses and abuses of ancient Greek and Roman voyage narratives during the nineteenth-century age of imperial exploration at the edges of the earth, laying the groundwork for a dissertation within this new subfield of “Polar Classics.”

Kathryn also writes about the afterlives of Roman politician Marcus Tullius Cicero, including the chapter “Law & Orator: Depicting Cicero through Modern Mystery Fiction,” for the De Gruyter volume Portraying Cicero in Literature, Culture, and Politics. Similarly, Kathryn has worked to trace threads of the classical past within the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien, leading to an article for the journal thersites, “G.B. Smith’s ‘Elzevir Cicero’ and the Construction of Queer Immortality in Tolkien’s Mythopoeia.” Some of Kathryn’s other academic pursuits include creative translation of ancient poetry, as well as analysis of Greco-Roman myths on stage, from the stage-plays of Anne Carson to the Broadway musical Hadestown. Across these diverse classical reception interests, Kathryn’s research broadly considers questions of gender, sexuality, and colonialism, from antiquity to the present day.

Isabelle Avci is a third year doctoral candidate in the History Department of Johns Hopkins University. She works at the interstices of early modern intellectual and cultural history in western Europe especially on the relationship between political and religious thought from the Renaissance through the Reformation. She is developing a dissertation centred in the British Empire in the second half of the seventeenth century. 

 Her project explores the intellectual consequences of different accounts of consciousness, especially of dreams and visions in an age of prophecy and apocalyptic literature, on notions of the liberty of conscience.  She explores both the intellectual traditions that support radical religious language as well as the cultural context of empire and the changes "discovery" and imperial conquest make for the meaning of mobility.