Scientific Revolution

Meredith Ray
Professor, University of Delaware

Meredith Ray is Associate Professor of Italian at the University of Delaware with a joint appointment in the Department of Women & Gender Studies. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Her research interests include gender and early modern scientific culture, epistolary writing, convent culture, women's writing in the Seicento, and contemporary fictions of Renaissance Italy. She is the author of Writing Gender in Women's Letter Collections of the Italian Renaissance (Toronto, 2009), which was awarded an American Association of Italian Studies Best Book Prize; and the co-editor of Arcangela Tarabotti's Lettere familiari e di complimento (Turin, 2005) and Arcangela Tarabotti: Letters Familiar and Formal (Toronto, 2012). Her most recent book is Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Harvard University Press: 2015). She serves on the executive committee of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women (SSEMW), the editorial board of the University of Chicago Italian Women Writers Project, and as Italian Literature Track Director for the Sixteenth Century Studies Society and Conference (SCSC). She has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Foundation, the American Association of University Women, the Renaissance Society of America, and the Penn Humanities Forum. She was a 2013-2014 Research Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's Alice Paul Center.

Monica Azzolini
Senior Lecturer, University of Edinburgh

Monica Azzolini has an MPhil and PhD from the University of Cambridge. She is currently a Senior Lecturer in European History at the University of Edinburgh in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology. Her research interests are at the intersection of the history of science and the cultural and political history of Italy in the Renaissance. She is particularly interested in how 'scientific' knowledge is produced and circulates in early modern societies. She explores how this knowledge shaped the lives of early modern men and women in practical ways. Within this broader framework she has recently concentrated on the practice of astrology within Italian Renaissance courts to illustrate the many ways in which astrological counsel was used to shape both public and private action. The outcome of this research has now appeared in The Duke and the Stars: Astrology and Politics in Renaissance Milan  (Harvard University Press, 2013) and a series of related articles.

Tara Nummedal
Associate Professor of History, Brown University

Tara Nummedal (PhD, Stanford, 2001; MA, University of California, Davis, 1996; BA, Pomona College, 1992) is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the History Department. She is the author of Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2007) and is currently completing her second book, "The Lion’s Blood: Alchemy, Gender, and Apocalypse in Reformation Germany." She recently served as guest editor of “Alchemy and Religion in Christian Europe,” Special issue, Ambix 60, no. 4 (November 2013). Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Chemical Heritage Foundation, and, most recently, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. She is Past President of the New England Renaissance Conference and a member of the editorial board of the journal Ambix.

Antonio Barrera
Associate Professor, Colgate University

Antonio Barrera has a BA (1989) and MA (1992) from the Universidad de los Andes, Bogota, Colombia, and a Ph.D. (1999) from the University of California, Davis. He is currently an Associate Professor of History and Africana & Latin American Studies at Colgate University.  His research specialties are early modern Spanish history, early modern European history, history of science, and Atlantic world history. He has written on sixteenth-century science in Spain and America, including natural history, medicine, explorations, navigation, and cosmography. His first book was Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution (University of Texas Press, 2006). His articles have appeared in Colonial Latin American Review and in various edited collections.

Pablo Gómez
Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Pablo Gómez’s work examines the history of medicine and corporeality in the early modern African and Iberian Atlantic worlds. Dr. Gómez’s current book project explores belief making and the creation of evidence around the human body and the natural world in the early modern Caribbean. He holds an MA and PhD in History from Vanderbilt University. Before becoming an historian, Dr. Gómez earned his MD at the Universidad CES and did his residency in Orthopaedic Surgery at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. Pablo has been the recipient, among others, of an ACLS-Early Career Fellowship, an ACLS-Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship, three Major Project Grants from the British Library, a John Carter Brown Library Paul W. McQuillen Fellowship, and an Elizabeth Crahan and K. Garth Huston Fellow from the Huntington Library. One of his articles, “The Circulation of Bodily Knowledge in the Seventeenth-century Black Spanish Caribbean,” published in the August 2013 issue of the Social History of Medicine, was the recipient of the 2014 Andres Ramos Mattei-Neville Hall Biannual Best Article Prize by the Association of Caribbean Historians.