Elizabeth Wood

Bio

Elizabeth Wood completed her undergraduate degree in history with a minor in secondary education at William and Mary in 1996 and received her Master’s degree in U.S. History from Middle Tennessee State University in 2004. Having taught at the middle school, high school, and college levels, including six years at Lynchburg College, she entered the Ph.D. program at William and Mary in 2012. Her research interests include race, gender, sexuality, and the interplay between the law and lived experience in the American South. She is currently working with professors Melvin Ely and Hannah Rosen to complete her dissertation entitled The Family Politic: Race, Gender, and Belonging in Old Virginia.  Her research examines the ways in which ideas and practices surrounding gender, sexuality, and family formation shaped free black experience in pre-Civil War Virginia.  She was a 2015 Virginia Historical Society Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship recipient. Her research has been supported by William and Mary’s Office of Graduate Student Research and the Morton Fund through the William and Mary History Department. She is also the 2017 recipient of the Ed Crapol Award in Modern U.S. History at William and Mary and the OAH President’s Travel Fund for Emerging Historians.