Rebecca Messbarger

Rebecca Messbarger earned her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Her major research interests center on Italian Enlightenment culture, in particular the place and purpose of women in eighteenth-century and civic, academic and social life, and the advance of human anatomy via anatomical wax modeling during the age.

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.

Professor Messbarger also edited and translated with Paula Findlen the volume The Contest for Knowledge for the University of Chicago Press series, “The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe.” She is the author of numerous articles, including “As Who Dare Gaze the Sun: Anna Morandi Manzolini’s Wax Anatomies of the Male Reproductive System,” in Italy’s Eighteenth Century: Gender and Culture in the Age of the Grand Tour (Stanford U.P., 2009); “Re-membering a Body of Work: Anatomist and Anatomical Designer Anna Morandi Manzolini” in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture and “Waxing Poetic: Anna Morandi Manzolini’s Anatomical Sculptures,” in Configurations. Her new book, The Lady Anatomist: Anna Morandi Manzolini (1714-1774) is in press with the University of Chicago Press.

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