Amy Wood

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. Her most recent book is Crime and Punishment in the Jim Crow South (University of Illinois Press, 2019), co-edited with Natalie Ring (UT-Dallas). She is also the co-guest editor of issue of Mississippi Quarterly on lynching, representation, and memory (2008) and the editor of the volume on violence for the New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (University of North Carolina Press, 2011). Her current book project, "Sympathy for the Devil: The Criminal in the American Imagination" (under contract, Oxford University Press) is an intellectual and cultural history of crime and punishment at the turn of the twentieth century.