Director of Medical Humanities
Professor of Italian
Affiliate Professor of History, Art History, Performing Arts, and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies
Rebecca Messbarger
Cultural historian Rebecca Messbarger is Director of Medical Humanities, and Professor of Italian, Affiliate Professor of History, Art History, Performing Arts, and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, as well as a fellow in the Institute of Public Health at Washington University. She served as President of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies during the 2021-2022 academic year, and is current Past President of the Society.
Her award-winning research centers on the Italian Enlightenment, in particular the intersection of anatomical and medical science, visual and plastic art, religion, and the shifting roles of women in the eighteenth-century public sphere.
Her monograph, The Lady Anatomist: The Life and Work of Anna Morandi Manzolini (U of Chicago Press, 2010), traced the remarkable life of the
18th-century Bolognese woman anatomist and anatomical modeler, whose patrons included Catherine the Great and Pope Benedict XIV. Translated into German and Italian, The Lady Anatomist was the basis of an award-winning film of the same name.
She is the author of numerous articles, including "The Re-birth of Venus in Florence's Royal Museum of Physics and Natural History," in the Oxford Journal of the History of Collections, winner of both the James L. Clifford Prize and the Percy Adam's Prize for best article in 2012-13.
She co-edited with Christopher Johns and Philip Gavitt the volume The Enlightenment and Benedict XIV: Art, Science and Spirituality (U of Toronto Press, 2016).
In 2020-2021 Messbarger was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome to conduct research on her new book project, Ghostly Light: How Criminal Corpses Animated the Italian Enlightenment. She has received major grants and fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and Washington University's Center for the Humanities. She also received major funding in 2021-22 from the Gateway Foundation, the Kemper Foundation, the Edward Jones Foundation, among other St Louis donor institutions, for the civic arts project she conceived and produced, Requiem of Light: A Memorial for St. Louisans Lost to Covid 19.
