Amy Wood
- About
- Education
- Awards & Honors
- Selected Research
Current Courses
HIS 100.001 History Lab: Foundations of Historical Analysis
HIS 136.005 History Of The United States Since 1865
HIS 136.006 History Of The United States Since 1865
HIS 499.024 Independent Research For The Master's Thesis
Teaching Interests & Areas
She teaches courses on American cultural and intellectual history, on U.S. southern history, and on historical methods and research.
Research Interests & Areas
Professor Wood specializes in American cultural and intellectual history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the history of the U.S. South. She is the author of Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940 (University of North Carolina Press, 2009), which examines visual representations of lynching and the construction of white supremacy in the Jim Crow era. Lynching and Spectacle won the Lillian Smith Book Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in History. She has also published several edited collections, including, most recently, Crime and Punishment in the Jim Crow South (Illinois, 2019) and numerous articles and essays. Her current book project, titled Sympathy for the Devil: Criminal Rehabilitation in the American Imagination, 1870-1930 explores the contested role of compassion as a social principle through a focus on intellectual, popular, and state treatments of criminality in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries. This project has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, and the Huntington Library.