Department of History

Tara Nummedal joined the History Department in 2002, after completing her undergraduate and graduate degrees in California. 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). 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), and, most recently, with Donna Bilak she co-edited Furnace and Fugue: A Digital Edition of Michael Maier's Atalanta fugiens with Scholarly Commentary (University of Virginia Press, 2020), a digital publication on a musical alchemical emblem book, Atalanta fugiens (1618). Her work has been supported by the 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.