My name is Maria Novotny, and I’m an Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. As a scholar trained in writing, rhetoric, and professional communication, my interdisciplinary research agenda considers the nexus of reproductive loss and infertility, reproductive health technologies and data collection, health advocacy, and patient lived experience. Through community-engaged methods, my scholarship articulates an ethics of care framework that centers the knowledge-making practices of reproductive health communities in rhetorical research and identifies community-based methodologies to enhance the decision making and consent practices of research subjects and communities.
My work addressing an ethics of care approach has been published in a range of peer-reviewed journals including Rhetoric Review, Community Literacy Journal, Peitho, Communication Design Quarterly, Rhetoric of Health & Medicine, Technical Communication Quarterly, Computers and Composition, and Reflections. Across these publications, I articulate how an ethics of care heuristic can aid writing and rhetoric studies to better engage, and ultimately, empower the communities relevant to our research and teaching. These commitments to community care derive from my collaboration with The ART of Infertility, where I have served as a co-director of that organization since 2014. This is work has been recognized as Rhetorics for All project, hosted through the Rhetoric Society of America.
Headshot taken by Jen Prouty.
Most recently I co-edited a collection of personal narratives, art, and creative writings representative of reproductive loss and infertility. This collection, Infertilities, A Curation, was published by Wayne State University Press in 2023. This collection exemplifies the application of an ethics of care framework leading to a reimagining of the public work of writing and rhetoric research and offering a model for which academic scholarship can enact reciprocity and amplify community experiences via creative, accessible genres.
Currently, I am working on a project which considers the implications of the 2024 Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling on embryonic personhood and its impact on access to family building technologies like in vitro fertilization and donor gametes. This project emerges out of a collaboration with EM•POWER, an HHS grant funded organization providing mental health support and counseling to donor embryo families. This work contributes significantly to issues of family formation, legal and advocacy rhetoric, reproductive rhetoric, and contemporary issues of reproductive technologies including data surveillance and reproductive policing.
You can learn more about my interdisciplinary leadership and approach to community-engaged practices by downloading clicking on the page which hosts my CV.
