William Eamon
Regents Professor of History, NMSU, PhD University of Kansas, weamon@nmsu.edu
William Eamon, a Distinguished Achievement Professor and Regents Professor of History, joined the faculty of the Department of History at NMSU in 1977. His research focuses on the history of science and medicine in Renaissance Italy and Spain, and on science and popular culture in early modern Europe. He likes to view the past through the eyes of actors on the margins of intellectual life. Thus, he has written about the 16th century “professors of secrets;” a surgeon who founded an alternative medical movement (Leonardo Fioravanti); astrologers, alchemists, charlatans, and natural magicians; and, in his current project, the Spanish naturalists in the New World. Eamon is the author of Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Princeton, 1994), The Professor of Secrets: Mystery, Medicine, and Alchemy in Renaissance Italy (Washington, 2010), and over 50 articles on various aspects of early modern science and medicine. Professor Eamon also serves as the Dean of the Honors College. In addition to receiving grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the Renaissance Society of America, Professor Eamon was a Mellon Faculty Fellow at Harvard University and a Senior Fellow of the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin. He has been a Villa I Tatti Fellow at the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, Italy, and he held the S. P. and Margaret Manasse Research Chair in the College of Arts and Sciences. In 2007 received NMSU’s Award for Exceptional Career Achievement in Creative Scholarly Activity. Professor Eamon also serves as the Dean of the Honors College.