Carla Zecher has been Director of the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library since 1999. At the Center for Renaissance Studies, a research center with an international reputation, she administers programming on medieval and early modern topics for a consortium of 36 universities located in the U.S., Canada, and Scotland. Carla specializes in sixteenth-century French poetry and music, and in early modern French travel and exploration literature from the Americas. She has published numerous essays in scholarly journals, on topics ranging from "The Gendering of the Lute in Sixteenth-Century French Love Poetry," to "Life on the French-Canadian Hyphen: Nation and Narration in the Correspondence of Marie de l'Incarnation," to "Musical Instruments, Glass Cases, and Headsets: Sound and Sensation in France's Museum of Music." Carla is currently completing a book manuscript titled Sounding Objects: Musical Instruments and Poetic Voices in Mid-Sixteenth Century France. She is also a harpsichordist, and received a diploma in harpsichord performance from the Strasbourg Conservatory in France, where she studied on a grant from the Frank Huntington Beebe Fund.