Marjorie Woods

Class of Fall 2014

Blumberg Centennial Professor of English and University Distinguished Teaching Professor

University of Texas at Austin

Weeping for Dido: Rhetoric, Gender, and Emotions in the Medieval Classroom

In her Academy project, “Weeping for Dido: Rhetoric, Gender, and Emotions in the Medieval Classroom,” Marjorie Woods will be revising for a book manuscript a series of three lectures she will give at the Warburg Institute. In these, she deciphers marginal comments in medieval Latin manuscripts, including over a hundred school copies of classical texts, to learn what passages received special attention from teachers and were performed by students in the classroom. She has found that the passages most popular with teachers were usually speeches, surprisingly often by female characters. By using recent research in memory studies, the history of emotions, and the connections between neuroscience and empathy, Woods unravels how the focus upon emotional passages helped students learn Latin and remember important literary texts. Moreover, performing speeches by women allowed boys to explore emotions that were denied them outside the classroom. This work, she says, has implications for current teaching strategies: “My study can help us learn from pre-modern teachers who were very successful in training students to a high degree of literacy in an acquired academic language using texts from a very different era, but adapting them to our own classrooms with the benefit of modern insights into pedagogy and societal constructs.”

Blumberg Centennial Professor of English and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin Marjorie Woods completed her PhD at the University of Toronto (1977) and BA at Stanford University (1969). The child of a military family, she credits her interest in the history of pedagogical practices to her own frequent school changes. She honed her intellectual interests by researching how students were taught to write in medieval schools as well as how pre-modern classroom exercises can be employed in the modern classroom. Much of this research led to her book Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the Poetria nova across Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Ohio State, 2010), which was awarded the 2010 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award. Woods is the recipient of a Rome Prize in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies from the American Academy in Rome and has been a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She is also the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Humanities Center, and the Center for Epigraphical and Palaeographical Studies at The Ohio State University, and has received research grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and American Philosophical Society.