William Noel, a distinguished art history scholar and associate special collections librarian at Princeton University, died after being hit by a van last month in Scotland, officials reported.
Noel, 58, of Philadelphia, was selected as Princeton‘s John T. Maltsberger III ’55 Associate University Librarian for Special Collections in 2020.
In this role, he oversaw the library’s rare, globally renowned collections and implemented projects and services to support the library’s mission.
Noel was hospitalized after being hit by a van in Edinburgh, Scotland, on April 10 at about 5:50 p.m., Scotland police reported.
Weeks later on April 29, he died of his injuries, officials said.
The driver of the van, a 40-year-old man, was arrested and released pending further investigations, police said.
Authorities said a nurse at the scene tried to help Noel after he was struck, but left prior to police arriving. The nurse was identified and has helped with the investigation.
Scotland police have not released any additional information on their website about the incident.
Noel was well-known in academia, having previously served as the University of Pennsylvania’s Associate Vice Provost for External Partnerships and UPenn’s library’s director of rare collections and manuscripts, before joining Princeton.
He was also the curator of manuscripts and rare books at The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore and assistant curator of manuscripts at The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
For his scholarly work, Noel is most celebrated for his expertise in medieval manuscript studies, having earned his bachelor’s degree in art history and a Ph.D. in medieval manuscript studies from Cambridge University.
“Though Will stopped writing of late, he was an energetic and charming force for manuscript studies with a strong entrepreneurial spirit, and his death has been greeted with dismay by the medievalist community,” Cambridge’s Art History Department said in a statement.
“He was... a valued friend and a continuator of Cambridge’s tradition of medieval manuscript study,” the statement said.
In 2012, Noel gave a TED talk in 2012 titled “Revealing the lost codex of Archimedes,” which now has more than a million views. Noel also created the world’s first publicly available multi-spectral data set for a medieval manuscript, Princeton University noted.
In a 2020 release announcing his appointment to Princeton library’s special collections department, the university quoted Noel, describing him as a dedicated advocate for “making precious materials open and accessible to anyone and everyone who can use them to build knowledge of our world and societies.”
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Nyah Marshall may be reached at Nmarshall@njadvancemedia.com.
