Tara Nummedal is the John Nickoll Provost's Professor of History and Professor of Italian Studies at Brown University. She is a historian of early modern alchemy, fraud, and entrepreneurship whose work has reshaped understanding of alchemy's place in the economic, legal, and social history of early modern Europe. Her monograph Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2007) demonstrates that alchemical practitioners operated within complex networks of patronage, investment, and legal regulation — the same networks that shaped Maier's career as he moved from Rudolf II's court through England to Moritz von Hessen's household.

Nummedal co-edited Furnace and Fugue: A Digital Edition of Michael Maier's Atalanta fugiens with Scholarly Commentary (University of Virginia Press, 2020) with Donna Bilak, a project that won the 2022 Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Creativity in Digital History from the American Historical Association. The project was the first digital publication produced by Brown University Digital Publications, a signature program within Brown's Center for Digital Scholarship launched with Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funding. Nummedal was appointed Faculty Director of Brown's Center for Digital Scholarship in July 2023.

The Furnace and Fugue project emerged from Nummedal's recognition that modern disciplinary boundaries have fractured the wide-ranging expertise a seventeenth-century reader would have needed to engage with Maier's multimedia work. The editors convened historians of science, music, mathematics, and art alongside rare book curators and professional singers to produce a collaborative digital edition that allows readers to hear, see, manipulate, and investigate the Atalanta Fugiens in ways that Maier may have imagined but that were technically impossible before digital publication. The edition features interactive tools for comparing text, image, and music side by side, and includes a manipulable performance space where users can curate their own selections and arrangements.

Nummedal's broader scholarly contribution to understanding Maier lies in her contextual work on alchemy and authority. Her research demonstrates that the line between legitimate and fraudulent alchemy was constantly negotiated in early modern courts, and that practitioners like Maier operated in a precarious space between patronage and prosecution. This perspective illuminates Maier's careful self-presentation through his published works, his strategic dedications to Protestant rulers, and his insistence on chemical (not alchemical) terminology.

For this site, Nummedal's work provides the institutional model for digital humanities engagement with the Atalanta Fugiens. The Furnace and Fugue project is the primary alternative digital resource, and its collaborative methodology — bringing together scholars from multiple disciplines to address a multimedia work — has influenced this project's own interdisciplinary approach.