Carly S. Woods

Dr. Carly S. Woods studies rhetorics of belonging and exclusion within education, politics, and social movements. As a humanities-based communication scholar with a passion for history and feminist studies, she is particularly interested in discourses of gender, race, class, sexuality, and nation within these contexts. Her research is published in academic journals such as Argumentation and Advocacy, the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and Women's Studies in Communication. Woods is the recipient of numerous research and teaching honors, and her work has been funded by organizations such as the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics and the Organization for Research on Women and Communication.

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. 

Current research projects focus on the rhetoric and public memory of politician Barbara Jordan and histories of international argumentation and education.

At UMD, Woods regularly teaches courses on rhetoric, public address, and social change. She currently serves as book review editor for Argumentation and Advocacy.

Woods Graduate Advising Philosophy