Deborah Maltby

Associate Teaching Professor Emeritus
427 Lucas Hall
314-516-5579
maltbyd@umsl.edu

PhD, English and History, University of Missouri-Kansas City
MA, English, University of North Carolina Charlotte
BA, Journalism, University of South Carolina

Deborah Maltby earned the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Journalism from the University of South Carolina and enjoyed a long career in journalism and public relations, including writing for many publications and owning her own public relations firm. She then earned a Master of Arts in English degree from the University of North Carolina Charlotte, where she taught first-year composition. She taught at William Jewell College in Liberty, MO, from 1996-2007.

Dr. Maltby earned her PhD in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Nineteenth-Century British History, and Composition and Rhetoric from the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where she was awarded several doctoral fellowships, including the Distinguished Dissertation Fellowship. Her doctoral dissertation, Reading ‘Hodge’: Nineteenth-Century English Rural Workers, was named the Outstanding Dissertation in the Humanities at UMKC in 2007. She taught literature at UMKC while working on the PhD. 

Dr. Maltby came to UMSL in 2007 as an assistant teaching professor of English and was promoted to associate teaching professor of English in 2013.  In 2014 she was named winner of the Chancellor's Award for Excellence to a Non-Tenure-Track Faculty Member.

At UMSL Dr. Maltby teaches junior-level writing, writing about literature with critical theory, British literature survey after 1789, and graduate seminars in Victorian literature. Her writing courses often incorporate service-learning, and she is a member and past co-chair of UMSL’s service-learning leadership team. She is also part of a UMSL team which developed a model that uses Reacting to the Past (RTTP) pedagogy to teach first-year writing. In RTTP, students play elaborate historical games to learn history, culture, and argumentation. 

Her current research focuses on experiential learning/interactive pedagogies such as service-learning and RTTP. She presented sessions on teaching writing at international RTTP faculty institutes in New York City in 2014 and 2015.

Dr. Maltby also continues to study the rhetorical effects of public writing that depicts marginalized groups of people. Her article about nineteenth-century British journalistic rhetoric and rural workers was published in the interdisciplinary journal Clio in 2008. Her article about teaching editions of Victorian novels appeared in 2012 in the Victorians Institute Journal. Her most recent paper at the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association was titled "The Major Said . . . Charlotte Yonge's Military Characters, Masculinity, and Money.”