Contact Information

Biography

Dr. Rebecca Maatta has been with 51°”Íű since 2015 as a Teaching Associate Professor in the English & Theater Arts department. She teaches first-year writing courses as well as writing-intensive classes in the health humanities including Healthcare & Literature, Anatomy & the Archive, and Nursing & Narrative. She also co-teaches the Anatomy sequence with faculty in the Physical Therapy Department.

Dr. Rebecca Maatta has been the recipient of the following awards:

  • John G. Rangos Prize, with Anne Burrows & Ben Kivlan, internal grant to create campus memorial garden for human body donors (Spring 2023)
  • Presidential Scholarship Award in Teaching, with Anne Burrows, Department of Physical Therapy (Spring 2022)
  • President's Award for Excellence in Teaching (Spring 2021)
  • McAnulty College & Graduate School of Liberal Arts Award for Excellence in Teaching (Spring 2021)
  • Creative Teaching Award (Spring 2021)

Education

Ph.D., Literary and Cultural Studies, Carnegie Mellon University, 2009
M.A., Literary and Cultural Studies, Carnegie Mellon University, 2002
B.A., English and Creative Writing, Carnegie Mellon University, 2001

School

  • Healthcare and Literature
  • Thinking and Writing across the Curriculum
  • Imaginative Literature and Critical Writing
  • College Writing Interpreting Literature
  • Interpretation and Argument
  • Shakespeare's Histories and Tragedies
  • Shakespeare's Comedies and Romances
  • Nineteenth-Century Science Fiction
  • The Victorian Novel
  • British Literature of the Romantic Period
  • Introduction to Gender Studies
  • Advanced Gender Studies
  • Fin de SiĂšcle Gothic
  • The BrontĂ«s
“‘When the dreadful steel was plunged into the breast’: Teaching Romantic Surgeons, Anatomists, and Bodysnatchers to Students in Health Sciences,” Romantic Circles Pedagogy Commons special issue on Romanticism, teaching, and wellbeing (accepted).

“Teaching with the Archive when the Archive Shuts Down,” Essays in Romanticism, vol. 28, no. 2, 2021, pp. 113-126

As Rebecca E. May:  â€œTracking the Unruly Cadaver: Dracula and Victorian Coroners’ Reports,” Bram Stoker and the Late-Victorian World, edited by Matthew Gibson and Sabine Muller, Clemson University Press in conjunction with Liverpool University Press, 2019, pp. 121-146.

As Rebecca E. May: “‘This shattered prison’: Bodily Dissolution, Wuthering Heights and Joseph Maclise’s Dissection Manuals.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 33.5 (2011): 415-436.

As Rebecca E. May: “Morbid Parts: Gender, Seduction and the Necro-Gaze,” Sexual Perversions, 1670-1890. Ed. Julie Peakman. New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. pp. 167-201.
“Medical humanities pedagogy in the cadaver lab: using narrative to promote empathy and metacognition,” with Anne Burrows, American Association for Anatomy, Washington DC, March 2023.

“What’s a Victorianist Like You Doing in a Cadaver Lab Like This?” Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference, Salt Lake City, UT, March 2022.

“From Dissertation Defense to Women’s Shelter in Eight Weeks: Navigating Higher Ed with PTSD,”  Rhetoric of Health & Medicine Symposium, September 2021, virtual.

“Students in Liberal Arts & the Health Sciences Design a Gallery Exhibit on the History of Anatomy,” Bridges and Borders conference, hosted by Carnegie Mellon University, April 2021, co-presentation with Thora P. Brylowe.

“Epidemiological Maps and the Death of Romanticism,” accepted for the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference, Los Angeles, March 2020, and withdrawn due to COVID.

“Teaching Victorian Anatomists to Students in Health Sciences,” Victorian Interdisciplinary Association of the Western United States, November 2019, Seattle, Washington.

“’The very subject before us
the flies that haunt the places of dissection’: Teaching Anatomical Knowledge Using Archival Illustrations,” American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, March 2019, Denver, Colorado.

“‘A gash in the universe’: Consumption and Annihilation in Poppy Z. Brite’s ‘Calcutta, Lord of Nerves’” Midwest Modern Language Association, Kansas City, MO, November 2018.

“’It was of unpainted deal, plain, strong, and scrupulously clean’: The Victorian Autopsy Table and Tabulating England’s Health,” Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Association, San Francisco, CA, March 2018.

“Tracking the Unruly Cadaver: Dracula and Victorian Coroners’ Reports,” Midwest Modern Language Association, Cincinnati, OH, November 2017.

“Victorian Coroners’ Reports, Form, and Fragments,” Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference, Muhlenberg College, March 2017.
                                 
“Natural History and the Unnatural Woman: Reframing Taxidermy as a New Woman’s Art,” Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference, Appalachian State University, March 2016.

“’I went into my laboratory to plan murder
on the biggest scale it has ever been planned.’: The Beetle’s Sydney Atherton as Vivisector-Hero,” English Association of Pennsylvania State Universities, Slippery Rock University, October, 2015.
                     
“Cork Legs and Steam Arms: Mechanical Surgery, and the Manufacture and Marketing of Artificial Limbs in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America,” Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference, Georgia Institute of Technology, April 2015.

“Bodies Yet Unknown: Gothic Literature, Vivisection, and the Physiological Sublime,” Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference, University of Houston, March 2014.

“Prurient Didacticism?: The Social Life of Anatomical Specimens in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference, U Virginia, March 2013.

“Joseph Maclise and Nineteenth-Century Anatomical Illustration,” Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference, U Kentucky, March 2012.

“Joseph Maclise and the Anatomical Arts Tradition,” Pennsylvania Medical Humanities Consortium, Philadelphia, PA, May 2010.

“Alter the Body, Alter the Being: Vivisection as Intervention in The Island of Dr. Moreau,” Pennsylvania Medical Humanities Consortium, Hershey, PA, May 2009.