Rebekah Fitzsimmons

Dr. Fitzsimmons currently teaches graduate level core communication courses (Strategic Presentation Skills, Writing for Public Policy, Professional Communication, Writing for Information Systems Management) at Heinz. Her pedagogical approach focuses on innovative use of digital technologies in the classroom, as well as helping experts translate and transmit highly technical knowledge to non-experts through storytelling and multimodal communication. She also chairs the Generative AI Faculty Advisory Committee for Heinz College. 

Dr. Fitzsimmons is the co-editor of the collection Beyond the Blockbusters: Themes and Trends in Contemporary YA (2020). She recently co-edited a special edition of The Lion and the Unicorn on Children's Literature and Digital Humanities. She has published articles in Children’s Literature, Lion and the Unicorn, the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy and the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. Her work also appears in the edited collections The Early Reader in Children’s Literature and Culture and the Prizing Children’s Literature Collection.  She currently serves on the Executive Board for the Children’s Literature Association and is the Local Planning Chair for the 2026 Pittsburgh Conference.

Prior to joining Heinz, Dr. Fitzsimmons was the Assistant Director of the Writing and Communication Program (2018-2019) and a Marion L. Brittain Fellow (2015-2019) in the school of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. There, she earned a certificate in Digital Pedagogy and won the WCP’s 2019 Award for Excellence in Pedagogy.

Dr. Fitzsimmons holds a PhD in English from the University of Florida with a concentration in children’s and young adult literature and culture. Her research interests include young adult fiction, digital humanities, speculative fiction, the process of canon formation, and bestseller lists. She is a Research Fellow with the University of Illinois's iSchool, where she is collaborating on a digital humanities project to analyze 75 years worth of book review data from the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books. She is also working on a digital humanities project using stylometrics (computer-assisted analysis of linguistic style), network analysis, and data visualizations to examine Caroline Hewins’s 1882 pamphlet “Books for the Young,” which is often cited as the first canon-forming document of the children’s literature field.