Lunch with the Libraries & Museums - From Heidelberg to Baltimore: What Johns Hopkins University Owes the Oldest German University

Dr. Mackenzie (Mack) Zalin is Librarian for Classics, Comparative Thought and Literature, Jewish Studies, and Modern Languages and Literatures in the Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins University. He earned a PhD in Classical Studies from Duke University and a Master of Science in Library Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Zalin oversees collection development, reference, and instruction in the Sheridan Libraries for French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, Spanish, and Yiddish languages and literatures.

In addition to his regular duties at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Zalin serves as the chair of the Advisory Board of the American Office of L’Année philologique to the Society for Classical Studies. He is also an ex officio member of the Société Internationale de Bibliographie Classique. His recent scholarship evinces an array of interests in early modern Spanish and Latin, as can be seen in co-authored publications in the Bulletin of the Comediantes and Grey Room.

Anne E. Lester is a social historian of medieval Europe and the Levant whose research explores fragmentary sources from French and European archives dating from 1000-1400. Her work examines how individuals, particularly women, peasants, and religious pilgrims, were represented by and related to institutional bodies.

Her first book, Creating Cistercian Nuns (Cornell, 2011), won the SMFS Best First Book Prize and traced how independent women's religious communities in northern France were reformed into Cistercian convents while maintaining their own ideals. Her current research analyzes sacred objects, particularly relics brought to Europe after the Fourth Crusade (1202-1204), examining how these objects transformed medieval Christian devotional life and ideas about religious difference.

Lester's research has been supported by fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, Institute for Advanced Study, ACLS, and Cambridge University. She serves on the editorial board of Speculum and chairs the Medieval Academy's CARA committee. Before joining Johns Hopkins, she taught at the University of Colorado Boulder. She holds an AB in Classics and History from Brown University and a PhD in medieval history from Princeton University.