A native of Seal Beach, California, and educated at Pomona College, UC Davis, and Stanford University, I am Professor of History at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where I teach courses in early modern European history and the history of science.
I am primarily interested in how all kinds of different people understood, transformed, sold, grappled with, and represented nature in 16th and 17th-century Europe. I situate my work at the intersection of the history of early modern central Europe and the history of science, examining connections between natural knowledge and gender, belief, the body, material culture, and the state in the Holy Roman Empire. I have long been interested in excavating the history of alchemy in the German speaking lands, and more recently have begun to explore the role of digital publication in the university.
My work has been supported by the 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.