Sandro la Barbera

2024-25 Stern Center/RSA Visiting Fellow
Ph.D., Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa
E-mail: sandro.labarbera@unitn.it

Sandro La Barbera is an Associate Professor of Classics in the Department of Humanities at the University of Trento, Italy. His prior research and teaching positions include the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Neo-Latin Studies in Innsbruck, Austria and Georgetown University in Washington D.C. At Trento he teaches undergraduate courses and graduate seminars on the languages, literary corpora, and cultural transmission of the so-called “Classical” canon from antiquity to the modern age. His research interests include: Greek literature, especially Hellenistic; Roman verse, especially from the late Republic and the early Empire; textual criticism, paleography, and the manuscript and print transmission of Classical texts; Renaissance Neo-Latin poetry; historical and theoretical interactions between music, literature, the visual arts, and the hard sciences; and literary forgeries and issues of authorship and authenticity.

His most recent research project has focused on the creation, transmission, and reception of pseudepigrapha in Roman culture. Forthcoming are his new critical edition of the pseudo-Vergilian Culex, and a monograph on Pietro Bembo’s 1530 edition of the Culex. Professor La Barbera is founder and Principal Investigator of the intercollegiate project FALSVM – Forging Authorship in Literature, Scholarship, and Visual Media, for which he has received a grant from Italy’s Ministry of University and Research (PRIN 2022 Scheme) to produce original scholarship, organize seminars and conferences, and publish an interdisciplinary online journal on forgery, authenticity, and related issues.

Alvan Bregman

2023-2026 Stern Center Associate Research Fellow
Associate Professor Emeritus, Library Administration, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Ph.D., University of Toronto
E-mail: ambregman@gmail.com

Alvan Bregman served as Curator of Rare Books and Associate Professor of Library Administration at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign before moving on to the position of Department Head in the W.D. Jordan Rare Books and Special Collections Library at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He was for many years an active member and Chair of the Security Committee of the Rare Books & Manuscripts Section (RBMS) of ACRL/ALA. His publications include the volume Emblemata: The Emblem Books of Andrea Alciato (Bird & Bull Press, 2007), and numerous articles on diverse bibliographical subjects, including early modern medicine and mathematics, emblem books, the Elizabethan scholar and annotator Gabriel Harvey and Reynard the Fox. For the past ten years he has worked closely with Stern Center Director, Earle Havens, reconstructing the lost and otherwise scattered library of over 5,000 ephemera collected and annotated in manuscript by the London parliamentarian, diarist, and bibliophile Narcissus Luttrell (1657-1732)—a project that will culminate in an on-line relational database and research tools in the coming years.

Kelsey Champagne

2023-26 Stern Center Associate Research Fellow
2021-23 Stern Center Postdoctoral Fellow
Assistant Professor, Departments of History and Museum Studies, St. Mary’s College of Maryland
Ph.D., Yale University
E-mail: kchampa3@jhu.edu
Website

Kelsey Champagne (JHU ’15) earned a Ph.D. in History and Renaissance Studies from Yale University in 2021, where she wrote a dissertation on the resilience of Catholic communities in Scotland, Maryland, and the West Indies in the face of severe persecution at the hands of British imperial power. She then returned to JHU as the 2021-23 Stern Center Postdoctoral Fellow, where she was involved in all academic and public programming for the Center, including organizing lectures, conferences, and international master classes, teaching undergraduates, and mentoring PhD candidates interested in the field of curatorship. Dr. Champagne also worked as Co-Curator of the Women of the Book exhibition, highlighting the intersection between spirituality and the written word across media in the lives of early modern Catholic women. She is currently studying the material culture, ritual practices, and economic history of a Florentine convent in the mid-18th century from a diary and inventory meticulously recorded by the convent’s keeper of the Christmas presepio in the Women of the Book collection. Dr. Champagne has recently begun a post as Assistant Professor of Atlantic & Public History at St. Mary’s College, Maryland.

Stephen Clarke

2024-27 Stern Center Associate Research Fellow
Honorary Research Fellow, University of Liverpool
E-mail: stephen.tabards@btinternet.com

Stephen Clarke is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and is the Chair of Dr. Johnson’s House in Gough Square, London, and of the Beckford Society. His central research interest has been Horace Walpole, on which he has published The Strawberry Hill Press & Its Printing House (Lewis Walpole Library, distributed by Yale University Press, 2011) and has edited Walpole’s Selected Letters for Everyman’s Library (2017). His most recent book concerns the Walpole collector and scholar W.S. Lewis, Lefty Lewis and the Waldegraves: Collecting, Obsession, Friendship, published by The Book Collector in 2022.

He also works on Samuel Johnson, Thomas Gray, antiquarianism, book history, and architecture / literature connections during the long eighteenth century. He has given talks at the Stern Center on John Evelyn’s architectural taste as formed during his Grand Tour (1643–46), and on an unpublished manuscript of Thomas Gray from his famous Grand Tour with Horace Walpole (1739–41) in the Sheridan Libraries, which will appear in Thomas Gray among the Disciplines (Routledge, 2025). He has two forthcoming essays on Samuel Johnson in The Age of Johnson, and other forthcoming articles on books from William Beckford’s library in The Library, on correspondence of Charles Burney and William Mason in Eighteenth-Century Studies, and on Horace Walpole’s Description of Strawberry Hill in Studies in Bibliography.

Carme Font-Paz

2023-26 Stern Center Associate Research Fellow
2023-24 Stern Center/RSA Visiting Research Fellow
Associate Professor and ICREA Academia Fellow, Department of English, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Ph.D., Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
E-mail: Carme.Font@uab.cat
Faculty webpage
WINK project webpage
Twitter accounts: @CFontPaz @ProjectWink

In addition to her teaching and faculty service at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Dr. Font-Paz is Director of the European Research Council (ERC) funded large-scale project WINK, “Women’s Invisible Ink: Trans-Genre Writing and the Gendering of Intellectual Value in Early Modernity.”  She is a specialist in women’s spiritual writings from the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries at the intersection of Protestant Reformation and Counter-Reformation discourses. Her research also examines the intellectual history of women throughout the early modern period through a comparatist approach, engaging in book history, ephemera, and socio-economic considerations surrounding textual production. Her forthcoming monograph, Women Writing on Social Change in Early Modern Europe (Brepols) brings together this wide range of interests.

Her most recent book publications are Women’s Prophetic Writings in Seventeenth-Century Britain (Routledge, 2017), and, with Nina Geerdink, Economic Imperatives for Women’s Writing in Early Modern Europe (Brill, 2018). She is also editor of the Brepols book series “Early Modern Women Writers in Europe: Texts, Debates and Genealogies of Knowledge.” Since 2018, Dr. Font-Paz has worked closely with the Stern Center on JHU’s Women of the Book Collection, giving several lectures, convening numerous academic conference panels and roundtables, and a contributing to Earle Havens and Erin Rowe’s Women of the Book: The Spiritual Lives of Early Modern Women, the first volume in a projected, jointly sponsored Pennsylvania State University Press/Stern Center book series to appear in 2025. In 2023-24, the Stern Center, Charles S. Singleton Center for the Study of Premodern Europe, and the WINK project at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona initiated a multi-year collaboration and students and faculty exchange between JHU and UAB.

JJ Lopez Haddad

2024-25 Stern Center Curatorial Fellow
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History, Johns Hopkins University
E-mail: jlopezh1@jhu.edu

JJ Lopez Haddad is a scholar of Europe and the Mediterranean during the High Middle Ages. His research centers on the lives of Christians under Muslim rule, and their relationships with Church hierarchies in Europe and elsewhere. He has also worked on the social history of England and France during the thirteenth century, focusing on urban life and development.

When it comes to historical books, JJ’s interests lie mainly in liturgical codices from the Middle Ages and early modernity. He works on rare books both as texts and as material artifacts, exploring what signs of wear and use, alterations, and craftsmanship over time can tell us about the people who made and used them. He is also interested in the afterlives of medieval books and their continuous use, and frequent adaptation, during the early modern period.

Before enrolling in Johns Hopkins, JJ earned an A.B. degree in History, summa cum laude, from Princeton University, along with certificates in Medieval Studies and in European Cultural Studies. His undergraduate thesis consisted of a new social history of Paris as glimpsed through unusual sources, in particular through the writings of a Latin Master at the University of Paris.
You can find JJ on Twitter @JJLopezHaddad.

JJ Lopez Haddad’s Stern Center Curatorial Fellowship has been generously funded by Meg Heisse.

Daniel T. McClurkin

2024-27 Stern Center Associate Research Fellow
2023-24 Stern Center Postdoctoral Fellow
Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University
E-mail: dmcclur9@jhu.edu

Daniel T. McClurkin’s dissertation focused on the production of an Irish national consciousness in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In addition to his work on early modern Ireland, Dr. McClurkin’s research interests encompass the reception of the early modern period, nostalgia and melancholia in modern literature, genre theory, and the intersection between settler colonization and literary production. At Johns Hopkins, Dr. McClurkin has taught courses on Irish Literature from the medieval to the contemporary, John Milton’s poetry, J.R.R. Tolkien’s medieval scholarship, and representations of grief and mourning in Anglophone literature. He is also associated with the Center for Digital Humanities at Johns Hopkins, assisting Tom Lippincott with the development of unsupervised neural architectures applied to the analysis of large datasets pertaining to early modern English textual representation of the Irish. Prior to his appointment as the Stern Center Postdoctoral Fellow, he served as a 2022-23 Stern Center Curatorial Fellow. In addition to his work with the Center, Dr. McClurkin’s work as Postdoctoral Fellow focused on creating greater access to and scholarly interpretation of JHU’s distinguished Tudor & Stuart Club early book collection, which is particularly strong in the earliest printed works of Edmund Spenser.

Mark McConnell

2023-26 Stern Center Associate Research Fellow
Independent Scholar and Antiquarian Book Collector, Washington, DC
E-mail: mark@cooperpoint.net

Mark McConnell investigates the economics of publishing in early modern Europe. He is currently compiling a database from the sixteenth-century business archive of the Plantin press in Antwerp, Belgium. His work has shed light on Plantin’s business strategy, including risk-sharing techniques, cost advantages of smaller format imprints, reductions of production costs through multiple-book projects, and investment in fine graphic illustration as a barrier against competition. Mark McConnell is a retired Partner of the global law firm Hogan Lovells, where he was one of the founders of the firm’s international trade practice, representing governments and major corporations in international trade disputes. A private rare book collector, he is building collections of classical Greek literature, in particular early modern editions; the Plantin Press; and the legacy of Hellenism in the United States. He is an alumnus of Johns Hopkins University, where he studied economics before earning an MBA and JD from Stanford University. In addition to his own lecturing at the Stern Center and his regular attendance of its annual lecture series and other programs, Mark has participated in several of the Center’s Master Classes, including a week-long May 2022 program focusing on Northern European Print Culture in Antwerp and Brussels where he presented his most recent research on the Plantin Press at the Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library.

Mark Rankin

2024-27 Stern Center Associate Research Fellow
Professor of English, James Madison University
Ph.D., Ohio State University
E-mail: rankinmc@jmu.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Faculty webpage

Mark Rankin’s research and teaching interests include the literature and history of the English Renaissance and Reformation, especially of the Tudor era (1485-1603); the history of the book and the history of reading; social uses of the book and the printing press to shape the development of elite as well as “popular” culture; John Foxe and the production and influence of his Acts and Monuments, or “Book of Martyrs;” clandestine printing and book smuggling; paleography and manuscript studies; iconography; scholarly editing; and the history of libraries. He has directed or co-directed four National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminars for College and University teachers, and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

He is the co-editor of Henry VIII and His Afterlives: Literature, Politics, and Art (Cambridge, 2009) and co-editor of The Elizabethan Catholic Underground: Clandestine Printing and Scribal Subversion in the English Counter-Reformation (Brill, forthcoming). He is contributing editor of Sermons at Paul’s Cross, 1521-1642 (OUP, 2017), and Editor of the journal Reformation. He was principal investigator of a major National Endowment for the Humanities Scholarly Editions and Translations grant on “The Independent Works of William Tyndale.” He is completing scholarly editions of Tyndale’s The Practyse of Prelates (for the Catholic University of America Press) and The Bale-Cancellar Controversy (for the Renaissance English Text Society). His current research projects include a census-in-progress of the first four editions of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, and a study of the early readers of Thomas More’s Confutation of Tyndale.

Rachel Williams

2024-25 Stern Center Curatorial Fellow
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Modern Languages & Literatures, Spanish and Portuguese Section, Johns Hopkins University
E-mail: rwill205@jhu.edu

Rachel Williams’ research interests include Spanish Golden Age literature, gender, sexuality, and identity. Her dissertation project investigates how the theme of the desengaño (disillusionment) manifests as a tool for disrupting binaries in various pieces of Golden Age literature, and how this theme may be applied to other literatures and time periods. Prior to beginning her doctoral studies at Hopkins, Rachel received a B.A. in the College of Letters in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University, where her undergraduate thesis explored representations of male lovesickness in the Spanish Golden Age.

Rachel Williams’ Stern Center Curatorial Fellowship has been generously funded by Mary Zampino.

Václav Zheng

2024-25 Stern Center Curatorial Fellow
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History, Johns Hopkins University
E-mail: vaclav.zheng@jhu.edu

Václav Zheng is both a historical theorist and a cultural and intellectual historian of early modern, particularly east-central, Europe. He is actively engaged in Renaissance studies, especially in Slavic Europe, as well as utopian studies, and the philosophy of history. His dissertation explores Uchronian thought and its embedded emotional repertoires in Renaissance Poland. He is also editing a critical translation volume on a fifteenth-century Polish intellectual text, and is planning a second research project on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Czech history writing. His theoretical interests focus on modern historiography, in particular on relationship of history and argumentation. He has been a course instructor at the Krieger School of Arts & Sciences since 2019, and a faculty lecturer at the Peabody Institute since 2023.

Václav Zheng’s Stern Center Curatorial Fellowship has been generously funded by Mary Zampino.