Matty Hemming is a cultural theorist of health care working across the medical humanities, feminist science and technology studies, and literary studies. She is currently working on two book projects. The first offers a literary history of 20th-century reproductive health care. Titled Writing Reproductive Injustice: Narrative Refusal and the History of Health Care, this project explores how transatlantic literary writers such as Nella Larsen, Jean Rhys and Toni Morrison critiqued reproductive injustices in Britain and the United States by harnessing aesthetic and political tactics of refusal. She is also working on a second book that examines relationships between nursing and feminist health activism in the second half of the 20th century. Support for her research has come from a Princeton University Library Research Grant and fellowships from the Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing and the Eleanor Crowder Bjoring Center for Nursing Historical Inquiry. Hemming's scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in venues such as Modernism/Modernity, BJM Medical Humanities, The James Baldwin Review and the Routledge Companion to Queer Literary Studies.
At Rice, Hemming is on the steering committee of the Program in Medical Humanities and teaches interdisciplinary courses such as “Introduction to Medical Humanities,” “Literature and Medicine,” “Nursing and Narrative,” and “Healthcare Activism Then and Now.”
SELECT PUBLICATIONS
“Criminalized Embodiment and the Limits of Abortion Reform in Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark.” Forthcoming Spring 2027, Modernism/ Modernity.
“Queer Reading Protocols and the Question of Reproduction.” The Routledge Companion to Queer Literary Studies, ed. Melissa Sanchez, Routledge (2025).
“‘Mrs. Don’t Care’: Refusing Modern Black Motherhood in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand.” Medical Humanities, Special issue on “Making Modern Maternity,” eds. Heather A. Love, Jerika Sanderson, Karen Weingarten, and Whitney Wood, 50, no. 2 (June 2024): 276-284.
“‘In the name of love’: Deidealization, Black Queer Feminism, and the Sexual Politics of Another Country.” James Baldwin Review 7 (Fall 2021): 138-158.
COURSES TAUGHT AT RICE
“Literature and Medicine”
“Narratives of Reproduction”
“Topics in Health Inequities: Healthcare Activism Then and Now”
“Introduction to Medical Humanities”
"Health, Humanism, and Society Scholars Medical Humanities Practicum”