Woods, Marjorie Curry
Associate Professor

Education: Ph.D. U. of Toronto 1977
Office Location: CAL 218
Office Hours: On Leave
Phone: (512) 471-8380
jorie@mail.utexas.edu

Marjorie (Jorie) Woods has been teaching English at UT since 1991.

Research Interests: Professor Woods studies how students were taught to write in medieval schools, and also the use of premodern classroom exercises in the modern classroom. She has just finished a book on the teachers' notes in margins of the manuscripts of a medieval rhetorical treatise, entitled Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the Poetria nova across Medieval and Renaissance Europe. Currently she is working on how female characters from classical texts were studied and used as the basis of composition exercises for boys during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Recent Publications: "A Medieval Rhetorical Manual in the 17th Century: The Case of Christian Daum and the Poetria nova." Classica et Beneventana: Essays Presented to Virginia Brown on the Occasion of Her 65th Birthday. 2008.

''Using the Poetria nova to Teach Dictamen in Italy and Central Europe.'' Papers on Rhetoric V. 2003.

''Weeping for Dido: Epilogue on a Premodern Rhetorical Exercise in the Postmodern Classroom,'' Latin Grammar and Rhetoric: From Classical Theory to Medieval Practice. 2002.

''La retórica en el aula medieval, con algunas aplicationes modernas.'' Lecturas retóricas de la sociedad. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2002.

''Boys Will Be Women: Musings on Classroom Nostalgia and the Chaucerian Audience(s).'' Speaking Images: Essays in Honor of V.A. Kolve. 2001.

''The Teaching of Poetic Composition in the Later Middle Ages.'' A Short History of Writing Instruction: From Ancient Greece to Modern America. 2001.

Awards and Honors: At UT she has been awarded the Harry Ransom Award for Teaching Excellence in the College of Liberal Arts, the University President's Associates' Teaching Excellence Award, and the Chad Oliver Plan II Teaching Award. Jorie Woods has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, and the Center for Epigraphical and Palaeographical Studies at The Ohio State University, as well as research grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and the American Philosophical Society. An Early Commentary on the Poetria nova of Geoffrey of Vinsauf (1985) received Honorable Mention for the John Nicholas Brown Award of the Medieval Academy of America. She received the Rome Prize in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies from the American Academy in Rome, where she is spending 2007-2008 working on her next book project, Weeping for Dido: Male Writers and Female Emotions in the Medieval and Renaissance Classroom.