Cogut Institute for the Humanities
Center for the Study of the Early Modern World

Tara Nummedal

Professor of History, Professor of Italian Studies
Research Interests Science and Medicine, Alchemy, Holy Roman Empire, Gender, the Body, Religion, History of the Book, Digital Publication

Biography

Tara Nummedal (Ph.D., Stanford, 2001; M.A., University of California, Davis, 1996; B.A., Pomona College, 1992) is Associate Professor in the Department of History. She is the author of Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2007), Anna Zieglerin and the Lion’s Blood: Alchemy and End Times in Reformation Germany (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), and, with Janice Neri and John V. Calhoun, John Abbot, and William Swainson, Art, Science, and Commerce in Nineteenth-Century Natural History (University of Alabama Press, 2019). With co-editor Donna Bilak and staff in the Brown University Library, she published Furnace and Fugue: A Digital Edition of Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens with Scholarly Commentary, a collaborative digital project on a musical alchemical emblem book, Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens (1618). Her work has been supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Chemical Heritage Foundation, and, most recently, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. She is Past President of the New England Renaissance Conference and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Modern History and Ambix. She teaches courses in early modern European history and the history of science.