Tara Nummedal

Tara Nummedal (PhD, Stanford, 2001; MA, University of California, Davis, 1996; BA, Pomona College, 1992) is the John Nickoll Provost’s Professor of History at Brown University. She is the author of Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2007), which she researched in Department Daston at the MPIWG as Predoctoral Fellow in 1998–1999 with the support of the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst. Her second book, Anna Zieglerin and the Lion’s Blood: Alchemy and End Times in Reformation Germany (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), was the winner of the 2022 Pfizer Award from the History of Science Society. With Janice Neri and John V. Calhoun, she published John Abbot and William Swainson: Art, Science, and Commerce in Nineteenth-Century Natural History (University of Alabama Press, 2019). As a Visiting Scholar in Dept. Daston at the MPIWG in 2017, she worked on Furnace and Fugue: A Digital Edition of Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens with Scholarly Commentary (University of Virginia Press, 2020), co-edited with Donna Bilak, a digital publication on a musical alchemical emblem book, Atalanta fugiens (1618) and won the Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Creativity in Digital History from the American Historical Association. Her current research explores a series of material objects—including Spanish fly and mandrake roots—designed to control the bodies, desires, and decision-making capacity of others in early modern Europe. At the MPIWG she is also writing an essay on “Alchemies” for the New Cambridge History of Technology, vol. 3.