Joycelyn Moody, an English professor from the University of Washington, Seattle, has been named to hold the Jane Watson Irwin Visiting Professor of Women's Studies chair for the 2001-2002 academic year at Hamilton College.
The Irwin professorship supports the needs and interests of women at Hamilton. It was established by Jane Irwin Droppa, a 1974 Kirkland College graduate, in memory of her mother, and then transferred to Hamilton College when the two colleges joined in 1978.
Professor Moody earned a Ph.D. from the University of Kansas and master's from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. At the University of Washington she has taught courses in later 19th century American literature, African American literature, major black poets, women writers and African American autobiography.
Moody is currently writing a book-length study of 19th-century black women's agency and self-representation in dictated slave narratives. Her book, Sentimental Confessions: Spiritual Narratives of 19th-Century African American Women, is forthcoming from University of Georgia Press. Moody has written articles and essays for a number of publications including The Womanist, The Raven Chronicles, and Religion and Literature, as well as poems and short fiction. She has also published reference book entries in The World Book Encyclopedia, The Oxford Companion to African American Literature and has an entry forthcoming in Dictionary of Literary Biography: American Women Prose Writers 1870-1920.
Moody is a member of the Modern Language Association and American Literature Association. She is the recipient of a number of grants and awards, and has taught in Zimbabwe and Cape Town, South Africa.
