Dr. Amy Wood, professor of history, will deliver the fall College of Arts and Sciences Lecture at 5 p.m. Thursday, September 29, in the Old Main Room of the Bone Student Center. Her talk, Sympathy for the Devil: The Origins of Modern Criminology, is free and open to the public. It will be followed by a reception.
Wood’s research agenda centers on the histories of criminal justice, racism, and violence in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Her award-winning first book, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940 (University of North Carolina Press, 2009), provided a sophisticated interpretation of the relationship between the public nature of lynching and other forms of spectatorship, both modern and traditional. Her current book project, Sympathy for the Devil: The Criminal in the American Imagination 1870-1930 (Oxford University Press) examines the cultural ideas about criminality and criminal justice that gave rise to modern criminology and prison reform. In addition, she has authored various essays and articles, as well as several edited collections.
“Professor Wood is one of the only professors at ISU to have won College of Arts and Sciences awards for outstanding research, outstanding teaching, and outstanding service,” said Dean Heather Dillaway. “For a professor to excel in all of these areas requires extraordinary skill and dedication not only to her students but to our institution and our community.”
Wood’s work has been consistently supported by both internal and external grant funding, including grants from the Huntington Library, the New York State Archives, and the Center for the Study of the American South. This year she won both a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship and a residential fellowship from the National Humanities Center.
Wood has delivered invited talks at multiple venues nationally and internationally, including keynote addresses at conferences at the University of Manchester and Loughborough University in England; and the American Studies Association of Norway conference in Oslo.
Since joining the ISU faculty in 2003, she has taught a wide variety of courses in U.S. cultural and intellectual history and in the history of the U.S. South, in addition to core courses in historical research and methods at the undergraduate and graduate levels. She has also overseen many graduate master’s theses and independent studies.
Her service to the profession has included her current membership on the Board of Editors for The Journal of Southern History and, since 2014, her tenure as the executive secretary of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. At Illinois State, she served for six years as her department’s graduate coordinator and six years as its assessment coordinator. She has additionally served on numerous departmental, college, and university committees.
“Professor Wood is a nationally and internationally recognized historian of American culture whose career epitomizes the values and mission of Illinois State University,” said Dr. Ross Kennedy, chair of the Illinois State University Department of History. “An innovative scholar working at the cutting edge of her field, she has won numerous awards for her research while at the same time compiling a record of outstanding teaching for the history department. She’s also a wonderful colleague with a great sense of humor—I am eagerly looking forward to her lecture.”
