Rate My Professor Rebecca Totaro

Rebecca Totaro serves as Associate Dean of Curriculum and Assessment and Professor of English in the College of Arts and Sciences at Florida Gulf Coast University, positions reflecting her long-standing contributions to the Department of Language and Literature since joining the faculty in August 1998. She earned her PhD from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2000, with a dissertation titled "Bubonic Plague in English Renaissance Utopian Literature"; an MA from Yale University; and a BA from Whittier College. Totaro's research specializations encompass bubonic plague, Shakespeare, and the literature and culture of early modern England, with particular emphasis on meteorology and physiology, earthquakes, human identity, textual representation, and broader experiences of complex disasters.

The author and editor of six books, Totaro's key publications include Suffering in Paradise: The Bubonic Plague in English Literature from More to Milton (Duquesne University Press, 2005), Representing the Plague in Early Modern England, co-edited with Ernest B. Gilman (Routledge, 2010), The Plague in Print: Essential Elizabethan Sources, 1558-1603 (Penn State University Press, 2010), The Plague Epic in Early Modern England: Heroic Measures, 1603-1721 (Ashgate, 2012), Meteorology and Physiology in Early Modern Culture: Earthquakes, Human Identity, and Textual Representation (Routledge, 2018), and most recently Care and Contagion in Shakespeare’s Changing World, co-edited with Darryl Chalk. She edits the award-winning book series Cultural Inquiries in English Literature, 1400-1700 for Penn State University Press, serves as series editor for Medieval & Renaissance Literary Studies for Kent State University Press, and acts as Book Reviews Editor for Kritikon Litterarum. Totaro's scholarship has been cited over 346 times per Google Scholar and earned her the Monroe Kirk Spears Award from SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 for "Securing Sleep in Hamlet" (2010), a Folger Shakespeare Library fellowship, University Excellence Award for Scholarship, and invitations to speak on bubonic plague at the Folger Shakespeare Library and Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre.