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. 

The Library is pleased to announce the appointment of Clare Kirkpatrick Jones as Assistant Editor of Brown University Digital Publications (BUDP). Reporting to Director Allison Levy, Clare’s first day will be July 10, 2023.

Clare joins an innovative and exciting program expanding the frontiers of scholarly publishing. A collaboration between the University Library and the Dean of the Faculty, launched with generous support from the Mellon Foundation with additional support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, BUDP creates new possibilities for the production and sharing of knowledge for both scholarly audiences and the wider public. Landmark publications include Furnace and Fugue: A Digital Edition of Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens (1618) with Scholarly Commentary (University of Virginia Press, 2020), recipient of the 2022 Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History awarded by the American Historical Association; Shadow Plays: Virtual Realities in an Analog World (Stanford University Press, 2022), recipient of the 2023 PROSE Award in the category of eProduct awarded by the Association of American Publishers; and A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures (MIT Press, 2022). Thirteen other works are currently in development and represent a broad disciplinary range. BUDP also partners with the MIT Press on a new multimodal book series, On Seeing, committed to centering under-examined questions at the intersection of visual culture and social justice.

As Assistant Editor, Clare will work as part of a multi-skilled team of experts to develop complex born-digital scholarship intended for publication with leading academic presses. She will play a key role in supporting humanities scholars in the creation of new scholarly forms that present research and advance arguments in ways not achievable in a conventional print format, whether through multimedia enhancements or interactive engagement with research materials. Clare will help administer national training workshops such as Born-Digital Scholarly Publishing: Resources and Roadmaps, an NEH Institute on Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities, and will work in close collaboration with the director to support new initiatives and partnerships.

“I am very excited to join the BUDP team,” shared Clare. “I look forward to contributing to this collaborative, creative endeavor that is setting the standards for the future of scholarship in the digital age and developing accessible, intentional, and inclusive scholarship.” Clare brings a decade of publishing experience to Brown. In her current role as an Associate Editor at Cornell University Press, she leads the management of the literary studies list as well as the award-winning Cornell Series on Land: New Perspectives on Territory, Development, and Environment. Clare is the recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright Program, Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is a graduate of Carleton College, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the University of Iowa Center for the Book. Clare received the Keats-Shelley Prize for her essay “Bat, Bat, Come Under My Hat.” She holds the degree of Master of Philosophy in Eighteenth Century and Romantic Studies from Queens’ College, Cambridge.