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Amy Wood

Professor
Office
SCH Schroeder Hall 307B
Office Hours
TU 1-2pm; W 2-3pm; and by appointment
  • 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. 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.

Ph D

Emory University

MA

University of Mississippi

BA

Wesleyan University

Outstanding College Service Award - Humanities

College of Arts and Sciences, Illinois State University
2021

Outstanding College Teacher Award - Social Sciences

College of Arts and Sciences, Illinois State University
2017

Outstanding College Researcher Award - Social Sciences

College of Arts and Sciences, Illinois State University
2015

Best Article in the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era for 2012-2013

Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
2014

Excellence Award for Outstanding Scholarship

College of Arts and Sciences, Illinois State University
2010

Lillian Smith Book Award

Southern Regional Council
2010

Los Angeles Times Book Award in History

Los Angeles Times
2010

Grants and Contracts

National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship
Amy Wood.
National Endowment for the Humanities. January 2023 - December 2023
National Humanities Center Fellowship
Amy Wood.
National Humanities Center. August 2022 - May 2023
Andrew M. Mellon Foundation Fellowship
Amy Wood.
Huntington Library. July 2017 - August 2017
Larry J. Hackman Research Residency Grant
Amy Wood.
New York State Archives Partnership Trust and the New York State Archives. June 1 2014 - June 1 2015
Postdoctoral Fellowship
Amy Wood.
The Center for the Study of the American South, University of North Carolina, Chapel-Hill. July 2006 - July 2007

Book, Chapter

Cole Blease's Pardoning Pen: State Power and Penal Reform in South Carolina
Amy Wood.
(2019), Crime and Punishment in the Jim Crow South/ University of Illinois Press
"The South"
Amy Louise Wood.
(2017), Wiley-Blackwell Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era: The Making of Modern America, Wiley-Blackwell Publishers
The "Vicarious" Play of Lynching Melodramas: Cinema and Mob Violence in the United States, 1895-1905
Amy Wood.
(2013), 113-135, Violence and Visibility in Modern History, Palgrave Macmillan

Book, Edited

Crime and Punishment in the Jim Crow South
Amy Wood, Natalie Ring, .
(2019)
New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Violence
Amy Wood.
(2011), University of North Carolina Press