The Medieval Studies Institute

William R. Newman received his Ph.D. in History of Science from Harvard University in 1986. He has been awarded fellowships, grants, and prizes from a wide variety of foundations, such as the American Council of Learned Societies, National Humanities Center, Searle Professorship at the California Institute of Technology, Chemical Heritage Foundation, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology, the Warburg Institute, and the National Science Foundation.

His main present research interests focus on early modern "chymistry" and late medieval "alchemy," especially as exemplified by Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, Daniel Sennert, and the first famous American scientist, George Starkey. Much of his research has centered on the history of matter-theory, especially corpuscularism and atomism, and on the history of early chemical technology. He has taught courses on these subjects in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, as well as courses on early science and its relationship to natural philosophy more broadly. Newman is General Editor of the digital Chymistry of Isaac Newton project and was the first director of the Catapult Center for Digital Humanities and Computational Analysis of texts at Indiana University.