Recipients of the Summer Stipends award are required to devote two consecutive months of full-time work to the recipient’s chosen project. Woods said he plans to spend that time this summer at the University of Chicago and Rice University researching Stephen Douglas and Jefferson Davis for his upcoming book and also to teach his students.
“I can bring in documents for them to look at; I can guide them through the process of designing a research project and carrying it through to its conclusion,” said Woods. “The kind of research that I’ll be doing this summer can help me with that because I’ll bring in things that I find in the archives to allow them to look at them. Those are the kind of raw materials that history is written from.
“There’s always a lecture component and there are always exams in my courses, but I try to give students the opportunity to work more hands on in doing the kind of research that I do.”
Woods, who said he received the news of the honor from the offices of Senators Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), was among the 10 percent of applicants who received funding. The national program received more than 800 submissions this year.
Woods received his Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina. His research and teaching interests include U.S. political and cultural history, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the U.S. South, the history of emotions, and the comparative history of slavery. He has published articles in the Journal of American History and the Journal of Social History, and is the author of “Emotion and Sectional Conflict in the Antebellum United States” (Cambridge University Press, 2014).
For more information about Woods or the history program at Marshall, visit www.marshall.edu/history.
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Photo: Marshall University’s Dr. Michael Woods has received the National Endowment in the Humanities Summer Stipends award.