We are pleased to announce the appointment of Rebecka Lindau as Chief Librarian at Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies. She began her career while getting her Master’s degree in Library Science as assistant to the West European Studies and Classics bibliographers at UCLA and subsequently as editorial assistant in the UCLA Special Collections department working on a facsimile project of early Aldine publications in their collection. Upon graduation, she went to New York University as the librarian for Classics, Hellenic Studies, and Philosophy. While there, she headed a mentoring committee and a committee to establish selection criteria for digitization, and served as the liaison to the office of international students and scholars, and as chair of committees in the ‘International Relations Round Table,’ and the ‘Classics, Medieval, and Renaissance’ and the ‘Philosophy, Religion, and Theology’ discussion groups within the ‘Association of College and Research Libraries.’
Next, she was appointed librarian for Classics, Hellenic Studies, German, and Linguistics at Princeton University. While there, she established and chaired the ‘Consortium for Hellenic Studies Librarians,’ with its second meeting hosted by Temple Wright at the CHS, and the ‘Forum for Classics, Libraries and Scholarly Communication,’ the first library committee in the then ‘American Philological Association,’ and organized and chaired a panel at the biennial Symposium of the ‘Modern Greek Studies Association’ featuring panelists from Harvard, UC Irvine (the TLG), Yale, the National Library of Greece, and others, resulting in a collection of articles in the Journal of Modern Greek Studies.
After Princeton, she went to the American Academy in Rome as head of the library where she evaluated and greatly expanded the classics collection, established and developed a substantial web and electronic resources presence, launched a conversion effort to the Library of Congress classification system, as well as organized outreach activities such as poetry readings and a music performance of Vergil’s Eclogues followed by a reception featuring a salad based on the Moretum, and an exhibition of rare and modern books, photographs, a lecture, and a film presentation on Rome’s Testaccio area, and initiated a digitization project of the CIL developing a partnership with the Deutsche Archäologische Institut and École française. While in Italy, she earned a Ph.D. in Classical Philology and Ancient History from the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’ with a thesis on the concept of virginity, chiefly focusing on Euripides’ plays Hippolytus and Iphigenia at Aulis. Her BA was in Classics with a double major in Greek and Latin from Stockholm University.
Most recently, she was the head of the classics library at the University of Cincinnati where she launched many firsts such as author celebrations for Ovid with poetry readings, Aristophanes with an enactment of Lysistrata performed by graduate students in classics and the College Conservatory of Music, and Seneca the Younger featuring a panel discussion with James Romm, Bard, Gareth Williams, Columbia, and Christopher Trinacty, Oberlin, and an undergrad experiment involving living ‘a life of a Stoic’ for one week. The next author featured was to be Plutarch. She further organized many exhibitions and events such as “Animals in Antiquity,” “Greek Refugees from Asia Minor” with descendants of Greek refugees sharing their stories, photographs, documents, garments, and other artifacts, as well as a performance of ‘Uproot: Greek Refugee Songs from Asia Minor’ with a Greek international music ensemble accompanied by an exhibition and Greek foods in cooperation with the Greek Orthodox Church and its Greek School, a virtual exhibition featuring a commemoration of the Bicentennial of Greek Independence, an exhibition on Ancient Medicine, and a celebration of the Bicentennial of the First Jewish Congregation west of NYC, and ‘Imaginary Creatures in Secular, Jewish, and Christian Manuscripts’ together with Hebrew Union College, and countless other events and exhibitions, blog posts, and newsletters. She also had all manuscripts digitized with accompanying descriptive metadata, and produced a large number of instructional and informational materials. She further organized an international conference with many participating institutions such as the National Library of Greece, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, University of Patras, King’s College London, Harvard, Princeton, Library of Congress, University of Michigan, and others, and established the ‘Greek Digital Journal Archive,’ an effort to digitize and provide open access to historical Greek journals and newspapers through JSTOR. She further led round tables and panels at the conference of the ‘International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions’ in Athens, and at symposia of the ‘Modern Greek Studies Association’ in Sacramento, Toronto, and, most recently, Princeton.
At the CHS, she hopes to build upon the outstanding work of Temple Wright and other CHS library staff in assisting residential fellows and readers and in developing the collection. She also hopes to focus on community outreach through various kinds of programming, and on digitization, and on conducting a careful examination and evaluation of the collection, the library space, and individual book treasures accompanied by web descriptions and virtual tours and orientations, and other informational and instructional materials online, in addition to pursuing close cooperation with Harvard’s classics and Greek specialist, Rhea Lesage, building upon a 20-year-old partnership and friendship, and with Dumbarton Oaks and the Library of Congress, and assuming a key role in the intellectual life of the CHS with the library as its nucleus.