Kathleen Woodward


Kathleen Woodward has been the Director of the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington since 2000, and is a Lockwood Professor in Humanities and in English. Her areas of specialization include the following: Twentieth-century American Literature and Culture; Discourse of the Emotions; Technology and Science Studies; Age Studies. Her fields of interest include the following: Culture; Digital Humanities; Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies; Literature. She is currently working on risk in the context of globalization and population aging. Her writing talks about the invisibility status of older women, and she advocates for an arena of visibility.

Education

Woodward, born Kathleen Middlekauff, attended Smith College where she received a B.A. in economics in 1966, and later attended the University of California, San Diego, where she received a Ph.D in literature in 1976.

Personal life

Woodward married journalist Bob Woodward, her high school sweetheart, shortly after graduating from Smith in 1966. They divorced in 1969.

Career

Kathleen Woodward taught at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. She has received institutional grants from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
From 1981-2000, she was the Director of the Center for Twentieth Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she also taught in the Department of English and interdisciplinary program in Modern Studies. From 1995-2001, she was also the President of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes and continues today to serve on its International Advisory Board. From 2000-2005, she served as Chair of the National Advisory Board of Imagining America, which is a network of scholars and leaders of cultural institutions who work to foster the development of campus-community partnerships. From 2003-2009, She served on the Board of Directors of the National Humanities Alliance. From 2009-2013, she served on the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association. She is currently a member of the Steering Committee of HASTAC as well as the Senate of the national organization of Phi Beta Kappa.

Works

Essays