
The Brown University Library is delighted to announce the new Faculty Director of the Center for Digital Scholarship (CDS). Professor Tara Nummedal, John Nickoll Provost’s Professor of History and Professor of Italian Studies, began her three-year tenure in this role on July 1, 2023. She succeeds Professor Steven Lubar, the inaugural Faculty Director, who made great strides to create an integrated and coherent suite of resources for digital scholarship at Brown.
As Faculty Director, Professor Nummedal will lead CDS in the further development and implementation of digital scholarship programming, including continuation of the Digital Humanities Salon series, a regular, informal presentation series bringing together digital humanities work across campus; a full slate of expert-taught, well-attended workshops; and the new Doctoral Certificate Program in Digital Humanities. Conceived and taught in collaboration with the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, the certificate program offers currently enrolled Ph.D. students added expertise in digital methodologies and techniques. In addition to programming, Professor Nummedal will work with Library leadership and campus partners to advance campus-wide visibility and collaboration with CDS around digital scholarship tools and methodologies, and to deepen the sense of academic community at the Library.
Tara Nummedal
Professor Nummedal has been a long and productive partner with CDS, having co-edited, with scholar Donna Bilak, the first digital publication produced by Brown University Digital Publications, a signature program within CDS launched with funding from the Mellon Foundation. Furnace and Fugue: A Digital Edition of Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens with Scholarly Commentary, published by University of Virginia Press in 2020, is a multi-modal, digital scholarly reproduction and interpretation of the musical alchemical emblem book, Atalanta fugiens (1618). It received the 2022 Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Creativity in Digital History from the American Historical Association and has been viewed by 22,000 readers in 169 countries to date. Prof. Nummedal was also one of the principal architects of the new doctoral certificate.
She is also the author of Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2007), and Anna Zieglerin and the Lion’s Blood: Alchemy and End Times in Reformation Germany (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 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).
Professor Nummedal’s 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 a co-editor, with Joel F. Harrington and H. C. Erik Midelfort, of the Studies in Early Modern German History series at UVA Press. She is a member of the editorial board of Ambix, a member of the Council for the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry, and Past President of the New England Renaissance Conference. She teaches courses in early modern European history and the history of science. She received a Ph.D. in history from Stanford University.