Rebecca Messbarger

Title:	Associate Professor of Italian
Degree:	PHD, University of Chicago MA, University of Wisconsin - Madison BA, Loyola University
Dept:	Romance Languages & Literatures Women & Gender Studies
Office:	Ridgley Hall 415A
Mailbox:	Campus Box 1077 One Brookings Drive St. Louis, MO 63130-4899 Hide Full Mailing Address
Phone:	(314) 935-5478
E-mail:	rmessbar@wustl.edu

Courses
Divergent Voices: Twentieth-Century Italian Women Writers; Italian Level III; The Italian Detective Novel; Italian Literature II

Research Interests
Professor Messbarger’s major research interests center on Italian Enlightenment literature and culture, in particular the place and purpose of women in eighteenth-century intellectual discourse, and civic, academic and social life. Structured as an extended disputation, her first book, The Century of Women: Representations of Women in Eighteenth-Century Italian Public Discourse (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), tells the tale of five paradigmatic and ideologically divergent texts by male and female authors whose leitmotif is woman. These include an academic debate, a scientific tract, an oration, an Enlightenment journal and a fashion magazine. By uncovering the characteristics of the expansive dominant discourse about women among Italian Enlightenment thinkers and of the counter-discourse women authors produced to assert their own distinct authority over constructions of femininity and the public sphere, this study reconceives eighteenth-century Italian culture and rectifies misconceptions about Italy’s position and influence in the European literary republic.

Professor Messbarger also edited and translated with Paula Findlen the recently published volume The Contest for Knowledge for the University of Chicago Press series The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe Series. This book delineates the cultural and historical contexts that gave rise to the potent defenses of women’s education by four extraordinary letterate of the Settecento: Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Giuseppa Eleonora Barbapiccola, Diamante Medaglia Faini, and Aretafila Savini de' Rossi. In sharp contrast to the restricted presence of women in centers for intellectual exchange in the past and in other contemporary European countries, these women, who epitomized the increasing ability of women to influence public discourse, asserted their arguments within the leading institutions that constituted the Enlightenment Republic of Letters: at the podiums of scientific and literary academies and in the pages of prominent journals.

Currently, Professor Messbarger is completing for University of Chicago Press Waxing Poetic: The Lifework of Anatomist and Anatomical Wax Modeler Anna Morandi Manzolini (1714-1774). This book reclaims from obscurity the story of a pioneering woman scientist-artist, who surmounted meager origins, limited formal education, and bias against her sex to become the most acclaimed anatomical wax modeler of Enlightenment Bologna, counting among her patrons and admirers such eminent figures as Pope Benedict XIV, the Royal Society of London, Catherine the Great, and Emperor Joseph II of Austria.

Selected Publications

The Century of Women: Representations of Women in Eighteenth-Century Italian Public Discourse. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002.

The Contest for Knowledge: Debates over Womens' Learning in Enlightenment Italy. Edited and translated with Paula Findlen. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe, University of Chciago Press, 2005.

"Re-membering a Body of Work: Anatomist and Anatomical DEsigner Anna Morandi Manzolini." Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 32 (2003): 123-154.

"Double-Crossing: Female Impersonation in Gasparo Gozzi's Gazzetta veneta," M/MLA Journal 35.1 (2002): 1-13.

"Waxing Poetic: Anna Morandi Manzolini's Anatomical Sculptures," Configurations 9 (2001): 65-97.