The English Suite
Christine M. Woody, PhD
- Associate Professor
- Textual Scholarship Certificate Program Director
Affiliated Programs
Education
- PhD, English Literature
University of Pennsylvania (PA) - MA, Humanities and Social Thought
New York University (NY) - BA with Honours, English Literature
McGill University (Quebec)
About Me
I work on the literature and publishing culture of eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain. I am particularly interested in dynamics like serialization, anonymous/pseudonymous publication, and the professionalization and commodification of writing. My love for this period—with its rapidly changing media landscape, highly polarized politics, and expanding access to publication for everyday people—stems from a fundamental similarity I see between this past and our present. I believe these 200-year-old debates over the value of art, the nature of truth, and the centrality of creativity to our humanity remain relevant to how our world works and how we move through it.
I often teach courses based around genre—including epic, lyric, allegory, romance, life writing, and the novel—as well as courses based in my period of expertise. I am the director of the Textual Scholarship Certificate Program and in that capacity offer courses in book history and editorial theory and practice. I also have the privilege to advise certificate students in their capstone projects. After completing the program, students have gone on to attend graduate programs in English, Publishing, and Library Science as well as to publish their capstone research with scholarly journals and present it at academic conferences. I regularly offer paid research opportunities for students, including teaching them to code as part of my digital humanities editing project outlined below.
Please reach out with any questions you might have about the Textual Scholarship Certificate Program.
At Home with Humanities
Take a virtual tour of the Humanities Department featuring artwork from our students and published works from our faculty
Research Interests
My book manuscript, Publishing Personality: Romantic Periodicals and the Paradox of Living Authorship, examines how the media environment of the British Romantic periodical plays host to an extended attempt to theorize, narrativize, and stabilize the meaning of the contemporary, crystallizing it through the figure of the living author. Caught between the copyright accorded to books, and their own position as paid piece-workers, periodical writers identify the ‘living author’ as a problematic state—stressing the conditional, serial features of authorship in practice, and probing the uncertainty of contemporary judgments about literary value, authorial life, and even truth. My chapters survey crises and scandals in the periodical sphere; from the famous personal attacks on Keats and Leigh Hunt, to the misogynistic reviewing of female novelists like Fanny Burney and Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), to the uproar over the political apostasies of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey. I argue that periodicals understand the living author as incarnating the problems of making sense of a rapidly-changing contemporary world. Paradoxically, the periodical’s vexed engagement with the living author as a threat ends up elaborating the concept, constructing publication as a guarantor of self and identity and the periodical as the space where the author can construct a sense of truth and authenticity, even at times in defiance of the material realities that surround them.
I am also at work on a digital humanities project, which involves the production of a TEI-compliant edition of the Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine series “Noctes Ambrosianae”. This collaboratively-authored magazine series has proved a source of enduring delight and scandal (for its contemporaries) and of scholarly fascination (for Romanticists today). The edition does not merely reproduce the portion of the series produced under the leadership of John Gibson Lockhart, but also tags important semantic and textual features including the use of languages and dialects, the representation of historical figures, and the inscription or performance of different attributes of class, gender, and nationality. With the end goal enhanced searchability and extractability, the edition aims to promote engagement with the series from scholars across Romantic literary and historical studies. Undergraduate students in Widener University’s Textual Scholarship Certificate Program contribute to the production of the edition.
Publications
- Woody, C. (2024). "Reanimating Romantic Print and Periodical Culture through Digital Humanities." Studies in Romanticism, 63.3, pp.421-432.
- Woody, C. (2023). "Book History Pedagogy with Periodicals Databases." Teaching the History of the Book. Eds. Emily Todd and Matteo Pangallo. Massachusetts University Press, pp.176-185.
- Woody, C. (2020). "Performing personae in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and Romantic periodicals.” Using and Abusing Romantic Periodicals. Eds. Nicholas Mason and Tom Mole. Edinburgh University Press, pp.76-94.
- Woody, C. (2018). “Neglect, Death, and Apostasy: Narrating Living Authorship in Romantic Periodicals.” Essays in Romanticism, 25.2, pp.241-260.
- Woody, C. (2017). “1817: The Birth of the Cockney.” Keats-Shelley Journal, LXVI, pp.110-123.
- Woody, C. (2017). “The Newspaper and the Novel: William Morris’s News from Nowhere and Commonweal.” Victorian Periodicals Review, 50.1, pp.139-156.
Awards
- Regional Fellow, Wolf Humanities Center, University of Pennsylvania, 2025-2026.
- Homer C. Nearing Jr. Distinguished Professor, Widener University, 2022-2026.
- M.C. Lang Fellow, Rare Book School, University of Virginia, 2022-2024.
- Regional Fellow, Price Lab for Digital Humanities, University of Pennsylvania, 2020-2021.
- Curran Fellow, Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, 2019.
- Research Fellow in the History of the Book in the Humanities, Willison Foundation Charitable Trust (UK), 2018.
- Scottish Romanticism Research Award, British Association for Romantic Studies/ Universities Committee for Scottish Literature, 2016.
In the Media
Noteworthy
Three Humanities Faculty Invited to Join Summer Leadership Development Program
Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing Jessica Guzman, Assistant Professor of English Christine Woody, and Assistant Professor of Sociology Jennifer Padilla Wyse have been invited to participate in Swarthmore College’s Humanities Leadership Development Program.
This program is designed for faculty in the humanities and will provide facilitated discussions, guest speakers, case studies, and more for faculty from Widener and select other Philadelphia-area colleges and universities. The goal is to support faculty in growing their leadership skills and continuing to step into leadership roles within their institutions. The experience is funded by a grant from The Mellon Foundation, a known advocate for humanities and the arts.
Christine Woody gives talk at Rosenbach Museum & Library
Christine Woody, an assistant professor of English, gave a talk at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia. The lecture "A Prehistory of Oversharing: The Romantic Magazine as Social Media" explored the dynamics and authorial practices of pseudonymous magazine authors in late-Romantic Britain.
Share Link: https://www.widener.edu/node/11611/