About Me

I am a Teaching Professor Emeritus in the Honors Program of the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where I taught writing, research, local history, and critical thinking courses. I earned my interdisciplinary doctorate in English and history at UMKC; I have a master’s degree in English from UMKC and a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Southern Methodist University in Dallas. My research focuses on local history and the rhetoric and history of women in the United States.

My book, Praising Girls: The Rhetoric of Young Women, 1895-1930, was published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2016. I co-edited In the Archives of Composition: Writing and Rhetoric in High Schools and Normal Schools, which was released by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2015.

The Kansas City Public Library features my article on African American activist Lucile Bluford on its website, The Pendergast Years: Kansas City in the Jazz Age & Great Depression.

My work also has appeared in American Periodicals, Rhetoric Review, and Feminist Challenges or Feminist Rhetoric? Locations, Scholarship, Discourse (Cambridge Scholars, 2014).

I won the 2012 Rhetoric Society of America Dissertation Award. In my previous career, I was a reporter for the Kansas City Star, and for a newspaper and city magazine in Dallas. When I am not writing, I like to cook, travel, walk,  watch sports with my husband, Alan Wood, and visit my daughters, Tessa Wood, who works in Boston, Adrienne Wood, an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, and their families. 

Contact me at woodhr@umkc.edu