Professor Wood is a historian of the early modern world. She focuses on Francophone history in comparative perspective with attention to legality, risk, and place.
Her first book, Archipelago of Justice: Law in France's Early Modern Empire (Yale University Press, 2020) reveals how courts became liaisons between France and its new colonial possessions in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans between 1680 and 1780. Her second book project is Precarious Fortunes: Women, Catastrophe & Complicity in the French Tropics. It examines often-ignored civil litigation from French Caribbean colonies from the perspective of women--enslaved and free, married and single--whose status and power could change in an instant.
Professor Wood is also at work on other projects on the entangled domains of legal and scientific knowledge, legal consciousness in Indian Ocean taverns, public and private space in Caribbean slave societies, and exile in the circum-Caribbean.
Professor Wood has taught courses on a wide array of topics, from pirates in the Atlantic world to monsoon empires of the Indian Ocean, 800-1800. She was a Hurst Institute fellow in 2013.
You can read more about her research at her website, Clionaute.
Welcome, Professor Wood!
--Mitra Sharafi
