Lunch with the Libraries & Museums - The Ephemeral Renaissance: Rare and Unique Single-Sheet Broadsides at the Sheridan Libraries

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.

Martin Michalek is a postdoctoral fellow at the Virginia Fox Stern Center for the History of the Book in the Renaissance. Previously, he earned his PhD in Classics at Johns Hopkins, following his MLitt at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. He is a classically trained philologist, who teaches and publishes on Greek and Latin poetry and its reception in a myriad of places, from the Neo-Latin poetry of the Renaissance through to English poetry, film, and jazz music.