Earle Havens

Earle Havens (PhD, Yale University) 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 Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of German & Romance Languages & Literatures at Johns Hopkins University. His field of expertise is the history of the book and material culture in early modern Europe. His past courses taught for the MLA program have included: the History of the Book from the Ancient World to the Digital Humanities; Heaven on Earth: History, Art, and the Material Culture of St. Peter’s and the Vatican; Halls of Wonder: Art, Science, and Culture in the Age of the Marvelous, 1450-1750; and Text & Image: The Material Culture of Renaissance Europe, 1400-1650.

His most recent book publication, co-edited with Walter Stephens (Johns Hopkins University), is Literary Forgery in Early Modern Europe, 1450-1800 (JHU Press, 2018). He is also co-editor (with Ann Blair, Harvard University; and Anthony Grafton, Princeton University) of Information Cultures, a Johns Hopkins University Press monographic series on the material histories of books and ideas. His research has been supported most recently by fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Princeton University Library, the Houghton Library (Harvard), and the Renaissance Society of America.

In 2015-19, he also served as Principal Investigator (with Anthony Grafton, Princeton University; and Matthew Symonds, University College London) of “The Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe”—a five-year digital research collaboration involving the digitization, transcription, translation, encoding, and making searchable manuscript marginalia in 16th-century printed books, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.