Carly S. Woods

Dr. Carly S. Woods is a humanities-based Communication scholar with a passion for history, argumentation, and memory studies. She is particularly interested in rhetorics of belonging and exclusion within education, politics, and social change. Her research has been published in academic journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Argumentation and Advocacy, and Rhetoric Review. 

Woods’s first book, Debating Women: Gender, Education, and Spaces for Argument, 1835-1945, was published with Michigan State University Press in 2018. Debating Women highlights the crucial role that debating organizations played as nineteenth and twentieth century women sought to access the fruits of higher education in the United States and United Kingdom. The book was awarded the National Communication Association's James A. Winans-Herbert A. Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address and the American Forensic Association's Daniel Rohrer Memorial Outstanding Research Award. Woods is currently working on a second book, tentatively titled Ambassadors of Argument, which explores international argumentation, debate, and education in the interwar period. Other ongoing research projects focus on intersectional memory studies and the rhetoric and memory of politician Barbara Jordan.

Woods is the recipient of numerous research, teaching, and service awards. At UMD, she regularly teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on rhetoric, public address, and social change.

Woods Graduate Advising Philosophy