Matty Hemming is a writer, researcher, and teacher in the fields of feminist and queer studies, the history of healthcare, and literary studies. She is currently working on her first book, which offers a literary history of twentieth-century reproductive healthcare. Tentatively titled Writing Reproductive Injustice: Narrative Refusal and the History of Healthcare, the 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. The project draws on archival materials including birth control policies, nursing handbooks, and authors’ manuscript drafts to show how writers used personal experience and historical research to produce knowledge about the racial and class stratification of reproductive healthcare that is unavailable elsewhere in the historical record.
Prior to joining the Medical Humanities faculty Matty completed a PhD at University of Pennsylvania, an MA at the University of Amsterdam, and BA at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Matty’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in venues such as Modernism/ Modernity, Medical Humanities, The James Baldwin Review, and the Routledge Companion to Queer Literary Studies.
At Rice, Matty teaches classes on topics such as healthcare activism, literature and medicine, and reproductive justice.
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”