My research has focused on knowledge of nature and its place in the society and culture of early modern Europe. I situate my work at the intersection of the history of central Europe and the history of science, examining connections between natural knowledge and print culture, the body, gender, commerce, state building, and satire in the early modern period. I am particularly interested in the history of alchemy, and have begun to explore digital scholarship as well. My first book, Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2007), examined how three groups – entrepreneurial princes, cultural critics, and alchemical practitioners – competed to shape the meaning of alchemy in sixteenth and seventeenth-century central Europe. In addition to several essays that emerged from this project, I have published more generally on print culture and science in two additional essays, one (with Paula Findlen) on scientific publishing and another on the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher. My most recent monograph, The Lion’s Blood: Alchemy and End Time in Reformation Germany (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), takes up questions of gender, the body, and religious culture in connection with alchemy. Donna Bilak and I explored the potential of digital publishing in Furnace and Fugue: A Digital Edition of Michael Maier's Atalanta fugiens (1618) with Scholarly Commentary (University of Virginia Press, Studies in Early Modern German History, 2020).

As a historian of early modern Europe and a historian of science, I have primarily used the history of alchemy to examine questions of gender, court culture, natural knowledge, religious reform, and the body. Most recently, I have published two essays that attempt to frame the contours of these fields: the introduction to a 2013 special issue of Ambix on "Alchemy in Christian Europe," for which I also served as guest editor, and "Words and Works in the History of Alchemy," part of a 2011 Focus section in Isis on “Alchemy and the History of Science.” 

My most recent monograph, Anna Zieglerin and The Lion's Blood: Alchemy, Gender, and the Last Days in Reformation Germany (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), uses the dramatic tale of Anna Zieglerin's rise and fall at a ducal court in the 1570s as a point of entry into the intersection of science, gender, and religious culture in Reformation Germany. One of the few women alchemists about whom we have extant sources, Zieglerin practiced alchemy in her own laboratory, recorded her recipes involving a golden oil called the lion's blood, and attracted the support of a German duke for her alchemical work. At the same time, she articulated an eschatological program in which she, as a "new Virgin Mary," would use the lion's blood to repopulate the world in preparation for the Last Days. In positioning her body and her alchemy at the center of a spectacular cosmic drama, Zieglerin offers an opportunity to explore the porous boundary between science and religion in the era of the Reformation. My first essay associated with this project, “Alchemical Reproduction and the Career of Anna Maria Zieglerin (c. 1550-1575),” won the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry’s 2000 Partington Prize, a triennial award “for an original and unpublished essay on any aspect of the history of alchemy or chemistry,” and was published in the Society’s journal, Ambix, in 2001. In 2011, I published “Anna Zieglerin’s Alchemical Revelations” in Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science, edited by Alisha Rankin and Elaine Leong.

In connection with Brown University Digital Publishing, Donna Bilak and I explored the possibilities of digital technologies for understanding early modern knowledge. Conceived from the outset as a digital publication, Furnace and Fugue: A Digital Edition of Michael Maier's Atalanta fugiens with Scholarly Commentary (University of Virginia Press, 2020) brings together new interdisciplinary scholarship on the German physician and alchemist Michael Maier's Atalanta fugiens (1617/1618) with a dynamic, enhanced digital edition of the text itself. This extraordinary alchemical emblem book re-casts Ovid's tale of Atalanta—the fleet-footed virgin—as a series of fifty emblems set to music. Comprised of text, image, and canons for three voices, each individual emblem engages sound, sight, and intellect; read together, these emblems serve as an interlocking guide to alchemical theory and the production of the philosophers’ stone. As a pilot project of the Digital Publishing Initiative, Furnace and Fugue seeks to bridge the gaps between the readers of today and their seventeenth century counterparts. By transforming Atalanta fugiens into a dynamic, scholarly, digital object through the collaboration of historians, musicians, rare book curators, linguists, scientists, artists, and other scholars, Furnace and Fugue reflects a dynamic, emergent form of interdisciplinary scholarship.

My first book, Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2007; pb ed. 2019) argues that debates about fraud, carried out in alchemical treatises, laboratories, satires, paintings, and courtrooms, are crucial to understanding the varieties of alchemical practice in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Holy Roman Empire. As patrons and practitioners alike sought to navigate an increasingly vibrant and unregulated market for alchemy, they employed the category of the fraudulent alchemist to marginalize competitors, explain failed alchemical processes, and define what they envisioned the “true” alchemy to be. At the same time, literary authors and artists increasingly drew on the figure of the alchemist as a symbol of social and commercial deceit. By working on two levels, as an archivally-based social history of alchemical practice and a cultural history of why alchemy proved to be so contentious, this book not only reveals diverse understandings of what “real” alchemy was and who could practice it; it also connects a set of little-known practitioners to the largest questions about state-building, trust, and intellectual authority in early modern Europe.

Prior to the appearance of Alchemy and Authority, I published several articles in connection with this research. My essay on alchemical practice and commerce appeared in the 2001 state of the field anthology Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science and Art in Early Modern Europe, edited by Pamela Smith and Paula Findlen and published with Routledge. I also completed a pair of essays arguing for a critical reexamination of fraud in connection with alchemy: “The Problem of Fraud in Early Modern Alchemy” (in Shell Games: Studies in Scams, Frauds and Deceit, 1300-1650, 2004) and “On the Utility of Fraud” (in Chymists and Chymistry: Studies in the History of Alchemy and Early Modern Chemistry, 2008). In addition to the cluster of essays connected with Alchemy and Authority, I also published two pieces that extended beyond my main focus on alchemy. In a 2000 co-authored essay, Paula Findlen and I explored connections between new ideas about nature and new forms and genres of printed books in seventeenth-century Europe. The second essay (in The Great Art of Knowing: The Baroque Encyclopedia of Athanasius Kircher, 2001) argued that the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher’s work on the terrestrial sphere, particularly his spectacular book Mundus Subterraneus (1664-65), was an attempt to elevate what he called the “geocosm” and make it a fitting a subject of natural philosophy. In these two essays, I was able to explore my interests in the history of the book and the history of science broadly.

2018: The Richard B. Salomon Faculty Research Awards Fund, $15,000. Project Title: “Furnace and Fugue: A Digital Edition of Michael Maier's Atalanta fugiens (1618) with Scholarly Commentary,” with Donna Bilak.

2018: Humanities Grant, Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, $16,000. Project Title: “Furnace and Fugue: A Digital Edition of Michael Maier's Atalanta fugiens (1618) with Scholarly Commentary,” with Donna Bilak.

2017: Seed/Bridge Grant, Social Science Research Institute, Brown University, $4,800. Project Title: “Furnace and Fugue: A Digital Edition of Michael Maier's Atalanta fugiens (1618) with Scholarly Commentary,” with Donna Bilak.

2011-12: John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.

2010-11: American Council of Learned Societies Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars (Huntington Library)

2005-06: National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship.

2001-02: Sidney M. Edelstein International Fellowship in the History of the Chemical Sciences and Technologies, Chemical Heritage Foundation (Philadelphia, Pa.) and the Edelstein Center for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the Hebrew University (Jerusalem, Israel).

1998-99: DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) Annual Grant, Berlin, Germany.

“Alchemies.” In The New Cambridge History of Technology, vol. 3. Edited by Dagmar Schäfer, Francesca Bray, Tiago Saraiva, Shadreck Chirikure, and Matteo Valleriani. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.

“A Habsburg Renaissance,” in The Cambridge History of the Habsburg Monarchy, vol. 1, edited by Howard Louthan and Graeme Murdock. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, in press.

“Intimate Entertainments: Andreas Orthelius’s Opera Philosophica and Private Alchemical Practice.” In Privacy in Early Modern Saxony, edited by Mette Birkedal Bruun et al. Berlin: DeGruyter, in press (2025).

“Technologies of Desire: Alchemical Incest and Disruptive Philters in Atalanta fugiens.“ In „Michael Maier und die Formen (al)chemischen Wissens um 1600,“ edited by Simon Brandl and Volkhard Wels. Episteme in Bewegung, 89-106. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2024.

“Alchemical Bodies: Discursive and Material Visions.” In “Women and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe,” edited by S. A. Chowdhury, special issue, Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 15, no. 2 (Spring 2021): 121-132.

(With Donna Bilak) “Interplay: New Scholarship on Atalanta fugiens.” In Furnace and Fugue: A Critical Digital Edition of Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens (1618) with Scholarly Commentary, edited by Tara Nummedal and Donna Bilak. Studies in Early Modern German History. University of Virginia Press, 2020. https://doi.org/10.26300/bdp.ff.nummedal-bilak

“Sound and Vision:
The Alchemical Epistemology of Atalanta fugiens.” In Furnace and Fugue: A Critical Digital Edition of Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens (1618) with Scholarly Commentary, edited by Tara Nummedal and Donna Bilak. Studies in Early Modern German History. University of Virginia Press, 2020. https://doi.org/10.26300/bdp.ff.nummedal

“Corruption, Generation, and the Problem of Menstrua in Early Modern Alchemy,” in Blood Matters: Studies in European Literature and Thought, 1400-1700, edited by Eleanor Decamp and Bonnie Lander Johnson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 

“Gemstones and Philosophers’ Stones,” in Wonder: 50 years of RISD Glass, edited by Denise Markonish Providence, RI: Rhode Island School of Design, 2017.

"Double Take." Manual: A Resource About Art and Its Making Issue 6: Assemblage (Spring 2016).

“Spuren der alchemischen Vergangenheit. Das Labor als Archiv im frühneuzeitlichen Sachsen” [“Traces of the Alchemical Past: The Laboratory as Archive in Early Modern Saxony”]. In Spuren der Avantgarde: Theatrum alchemicum, Frühe Neuzeit und Moderne im Kulturvergleich, edited by Helmar Schramm, Michael Lorber, and Jan Lazardzig. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2016.

“The Alchemist.” In A Companion to the History of Science, edited by Bernard Lightman. Malden, Mass and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016.

"The Alchemist in His Laboratory." In Goldenes Wissen. Die Alchemie – Sunstanzen, Synthesen, Symbolik. Ausstellung Der Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel (Bibliotheca Augusta: Augusteerhalle, Schatzkammer, Kabinett) vom 31. August 2014 bis zum 22. Februar 2015, edited by Petra Feuerstein-Herz and Stefan Laube, 121-28. Wolfenbüttel: Herzog August Bibliothek, 2014.

“Introduction.” In Tara Nummedal, guest ed., “Alchemy and Religion in Christian Europe.” Special issue, Ambix 60, no. 4 (November 2013): 311-322.

“Words and Works in the History of Alchemy.” Focus Section on “Alchemy and the History of Science,” edited by Bruce Moran in Isis 102, no. 20 (June 2011): 330-337.

“Anna Zieglerin’s Alchemical Revelations.” In Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science, edited by Alisha Rankin and Elaine Leong. 125-142. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011.

Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

"On the Utility of Alchemical Fraud." In Chymists and Chymistry: Studies in the History of Alchemy and Early Modern Chemistry, edited by Lawrence Principe. Canton, Mass: Science History Publications, 2007.

"The Problem of Fraud in Early Modern Alchemy." In Shell Games: Scams, Frauds and Deceits in Europe, 1300-1650, edited by Richard Raiswell and Mark Crane, 37-55. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2004.

"Contractual Alchemy." Chemical Heritage 21:1 (Spring 2003): 37.

"Practical Alchemy and Commercial Exchange in the Holy Roman Empire." In Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science and Art in Early Modern Europe , edited by Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen, 201-222. New York and London: Routledge, 2002.

"Kircher's Subterranean World and the Dignity of the Geocosm." In The Great Art of Knowing: The Baroque Encyclopedia of Athanasius Kircher, edited by Daniel Stolzenberg, 37-47. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Library, 2001.

"Alchemical Reproduction and the Career of Anna Maria Zieglerin (c. 1550-1575)" (winner of the 2000 Partington Prize from the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry). Ambix: The Journal of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Early Chemistry 49 (July 2001): 56-68.

"Words of Nature: Scientific Books in the Seventeenth Century" (co-authored with Paula Findlen). In Thornton and Tully's Scientific Books, Libraries and Collectors: A Study of Bibliography and the Book Trade in Relation to the History of Science, 4th ed., edited by Andrew Hunter, 164-215. Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2000.

• 2022 Pfizer Award from the History of Science Society for Anna Zieglerin and the Lion's Blood.
• 2022: Roy Rosenzweig for Creativity in Digital History from the American Historical Association for Furnace and Fugue, co-edited with Donna Bilak.
• 2018: The Richard B. Salomon Faculty Research Awards Fund, $15,000. Project Title: “Furnace and Fugue: A Digital Edition of Michael Maier's Atalanta fugiens(1618) with Scholarly Commentary,” with Donna Bilak.
• 2018: Humanities Grant, Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, $16,000. Project Title: “Furnace and Fugue: A Digital Edition of Michael Maier's Atalanta fugiens(1618) with Scholarly Commentary," with Donna Bilak.
• 2017: Seed/Bridge Grant, Social Science Research Institute, Brown University, $4,800. Project Title: “Furnace and Fugue: A Digital Edition of Michael Maier's Atalanta fugiens(1618) with Scholarly Commentary,” with Donna Bilak.
• 2011-12: John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship
• 2010-11: American Council of Learned Societies Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars (Huntington Library)
• 2005-06: National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship.
• 2001-02: Sidney M. Edelstein International Fellowship in the History of the Chemical Sciences and Technologies, Chemical Heritage Foundation (Philadelphia, Pa.) and the Edelstein Center for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the Hebrew University (Jerusalem, Israel).
• 1998-99: DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) Annual Grant, Berlin, Germany.
• Finalist, President's Book Award, Social Science History Association, 2006.
• Rosenfeld Dissertation Prize, Department of History, Stanford University, June 2001.
• Partington Prize, Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry, 2000.

• Editorial Board, Journal of Modern History (2018-2021)
• Editorial Board, Ambix (2013-present)
• President, New England Renaissance Conference (2009-2013)
• Editorial Board, Osiris (2009-2013)
• Council Member, History of Science Society, (2011-2013)
• Council for the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry (2022-present)
• Executive Committee, International Society for Paracelsus Studies, 2005-present
• Member, History of Science Society, Sixteenth Century Conference, Renaissance Society of America, American Historical Association

Since 2002, I have taught a range of undergraduate and graduate courses on the history of early modern Europe, the history of science, and professionalization for PhD students. I have also advised undergraduate, MA, and PhD students, concentrators in both History and Science and Society, and supervised numerous honors and PhD theses, independent study projects and concentrations, and summer Undergraduate Teaching and Research Awards (UTRA). As the Director of Graduate Studies in History from 2013-16, I was particularly active in developing and sustaining a rigorous graduate program that can prepare our students for professional careers in academia and beyond.