Marjorie Curry Woods

Interests

Biography

Professor Marjorie (Jorie) Woods grew up in the military and moved almost every year. Changing schools so often generated her interest in teaching, and she studies both how students were taught to write in medieval schools, and the use of premodern classroom exercises in the modern classroom. In 2010 she published her decades-long study of 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.

Representative Publications:

Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the Poetria nova across Medieval and Renaissance Europe. Ohio State University Press, 2010.

"Rhetoric, Gender, and the Literary Arts: Classical Speeches in the Schoolroom." New Medieval Literatures 11 (2009).

"You May Have Changed My Life." English Language Notes 4 (2009). Special Issue on Experimental Literary Pedagogy.

"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.

[Co-authored with Rita Copeland.] “Classroom and Confession.” The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature. Ed. David Wallace. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 376-406.

“Quintilian and Medieval Teaching.” Quintiliano: Historia y Actualidad de la Retórica: Actas del Congresso Internacional “Quintiliano: historia y actualidad de la retórica: XIX Centenario de la’Institutio Oratoria.” Ed. Tomás Albaladejo, Emilio del Rio, and José Antonio Caballero. Logroño: Instituto de Estudios Riojanos, 1998. III: 1531-1540.

“Rhetoric.” In Medieval England: An Encyclopedia. Ed. Paul E. Szarmach, M. Teresa Tavormina, and Joel T. Rosenthal. New York: Garland Publishing, 1998. 635-37.

“Rape and the Pedagogical Rhetoric of Sexual Violence.” Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages. Ed. Rita Copeland. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 56-86.

An Early Commentary on the Poetria nova of Geoffrey of Vinsauf. Garland Medieval Texts 12. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1985

Awards and Honors:

At UT she has received a Humanites Research Award, the Harry Ransom Award for Teaching Excellence, the University President's Associates' Teaching Excellence Award, and the Chad Oliver Plan II Teaching Award. Jorie Woods is 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. Her latest book, Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the Poetria nova across Medieval and Renaissance Europe, has been awarded the 2010 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award. She received the Rome Prize in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies from the American Academy in Rome, where she spent 2007-2008 working on her next book project, Weeping for Dido: Male Writers and Female Emotions in the Medieval and Renaissance Classroom. She will continue working on this project at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton during 2011-2012.