(Re)Introducing Michelle DiMeo

Previously a member of the MHL’s Governance Group, Michelle DiMeo is now the newest member of the MHL’s Scholarly Advisory Committee. Last month, Michelle became Curator of Digital Collections at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, where she will be overseeing the creation of CHF’s first digital repository and online collection. Prior to this, she was the S. Gordon Castigliano Director of Digital Library Initiatives in the Historical Medical Library of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, when she served as the College Library’s MHL representative. Michelle is currently the Principal Investigator on the MHL’s almost-completed NEH grant to digitize over 1 million pages of 19th-century American medical journals. In December 2013, she co-organized the symposium “Emerging Roles for Historical Medical Libraries: Value in the Digital Age” as part of the College Library’s 225th Anniversary celebration, the proceedings for which will be published as the Fall 2014 special issue of RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts and Cultural Heritage,  co-edited with Jeffrey S. Reznick of the National Library of Medicine.

In addition to her work in libraries, Michelle is an interdisciplinary historian who works on early modern science and medicine, primarily lay-practitioners and domestic remedies. She is co-editor (with Sara Pennell) of Reading and Writing Recipe Books: 1550-1800 (Manchester University Press, 2013)  and has published essays in the Intellectual History Review, Huntington Library Quarterly, and several edited collections of essays. Michelle also oversees the First Monday Library Chat series on The Recipes Project blog and has taught at Lehigh University, Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of Warwick, where she completed her PhD. Her current book-in-progress is an intellectual biography of Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh (1615-91), sister of the famous chemist Robert Boyle. This will be the first book-length study of one of the most important intellectual women in seventeenth-century Europe. In addition to supporting the experiments of her brother (with whom she lived for the last 23 years of their lives), Lady Ranelagh had her own international network and esteemed reputation. Using hundreds of letters, recipe books and diaries, this book will document Ranelagh’s involvement in the Hartlib circle, her contributions to Robert Boyle’s achievements, and her involvement in fields as diverse as natural philosophy, medicine, politics and religion.