Bio
Professor Wood welcomes students interested in all aspects of the early American republic. Her research centers on the social, economic, and political aspects of everyday life in the early United States, with particular attention to issues of gender, power, and belonging. Her first book, Masterful Women: Slaveholding Widows from the American Revolution through the Civil War (2004) reinterpreted the socio-political ideology of mastery over slaves through slaveholding widows' distinctive legal, economic, and social position within enslaving households and families. Her 2014 article in the American Historical Review, “‘Join with Heart and Soul and Voice’: Music, Harmony, and Politics in the Early American Republic,” adapted insights from musicology to explain key developments in grassroots partisan political culture at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Her 2023 book, Accommodating the Republic: Taverns in the Early United States, provides an alternative history to the familiar temperance narrative that depicted taverns as lesions on the body politics. Tavern goers and keepers played pivotal roles in the early republic's culture of improvement, the transportation revolution, and the contested elaboration of citizenship in the new nation. She is currently exploring research projects in divergent areas: the role of joy in the early republic’s public spaces and political discourses and the physical and cultural infrastructure of innovation in and beyond New England. Beyond the early republic, her teaching and advising interests encompass the colonial period, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, the history of slavery in and beyond North America, and early American women's and gender history.
