Research Interests & Areas
Professor Wood specializes in American cultural 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 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). She is currently working on a book project on cultural ideas about criminality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and is co-editing a book, titled Crime and Punishment in the Jim Crow South.
Book, Chapter in Scholarly Book-New
"The South," Wiley-Blackwell Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , eds. Christopher McKnight Nichols and Nancy Unger (Wiley-Blackwell, 2017)
The "Vicarious" Play of Lynching Melodramas: Cinema and Mob Violence in the United States, 1895-1905 in Violence and Visibility in Modern History, eds. Jurgen Martschukat and Silvan Niedermeier (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)
Book, Scholarly-New
Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1880-1940 (University of North Carolina Press, 2009)
Edited Other
Co-Guest Editor,"Lynching and American Culture," Special Issue of Mississippi Quarterly 61:1-2 (2008)
Encyclopedia
Editor, New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Violence (University of North Carolina Press, 2011)
Journal Article, Academic Journal
Amy Louise Wood, “Critical Conversation on Donald Mathews’ ‘The Southern Rite of Human Sacrifice’,” Journal of Southern Religion 17 (2015): http://jsreligion.org/issues/vol17/Wood.html
Killing the Elephant: Murderous Beasts and the Thrill of Retribution, The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 11:3 (2012): 405-44
Lynching Photography and the Visual Reproduction of White Supremacy, American Nineteenth Century History 6:3 (2004): 373-399
Presentations
Comment on panel: "How Black History Reshaped American History". Society for U.S. Intellectual History. (2017)
"We Can't Breathe": Ethical Engagement, Historical Memory, and the Spectacle of Black Suffering. Symposium on Spectacle and Spectatorship. American Studies Working Group. University of Manchester, UK. (2017)
Crime and Punishment in the Age of Jim Crow. Race and Incarceration Speaker Series. Colorado College. (2016)
Fear and Sympathy in Progressive-Era Criminal Justice: The Strange Case of Jesse Pomeroy. American Studies Association of Norway Annual Meeting. (2016)
Sympathetic Sentiment and the Psychological Treatment of Prisoners in the Progressive Era. Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting. Organization of American Historians. (2015)
Vengeance and Sympathy: Criminal Justice in America. Violence in the American Imagination. Loughborough University. (2015)
’For the Sake of his Heartbroken Mother’: Gender and Sympathy in Southern Prison Reform, 1890-1940. Southern Association of Women Historians Triennial Meeting. (2015)
Lynching Photographs, Tortured Communities, and the Making of Social Memories in the U.S.. Narratives of Violence. International Consortium for Research on Antisemitism and Racism. (2014)
Death Slump/Blowtorch: Lynching Photographs and the Making of Social Memories. Without Sanctuary: A Conference on Lynching and American south. University of North Carolina- Charlotte. (2012)
Grants & Contracts
Andrew M. Mellon Foundation Fellowship. Huntington Library. Federal. (2017)
Larry J. Hackman Research Residency Grant. New York State Archives Partnership Trust and the New York State Archives. State. (2014)
