Presenter Details

Tara Nummedal was raised and educated in California. Her research into the stakes of boundary making in early modern European knowledge communities has taken her to archives, libraries, and institutions in Germany, the Czech Republic, and Philadelphia. She believes that there is always a politics to knowledge, and is committed to exploring how people both in the past and in the modern university reshape ways of knowing in dialogue with changing social and cultural moments. Since 2002, she has pursued this commitment primarily in the History Department at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, writing about and teaching the history of alchemy, the body, and gender. 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), and winner of the 2022 Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Creativity in Digital History from the American Historical Association.