Kathleen Woodward, Director of the Simpson Center for the Humanities, is Bryon W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English at the University of Washington. She is the author of Statistical Panic: Cultural Politics and Poetics of Emotions (2009), Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions (1991), and At Last, the Real Distinguished Thing: The Late Poems of Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and Williams (1980). She has published essays in the broad crossdisciplinary domains of the emotions, women and aging, and technology and culture in American Literary History, Discourse, differences, Generations, Indiana Law Journal, SubStance, Journal of Women's History, Women's Review of Books, South Atlantic Review, Studies in the Novel, and Cultural Critique. She is also the editor of Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations (1999) and The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture (1980) as well as the coeditor of Memory and Desire: Aging--Literature--Psychoanalysis (1986), The Technological Imagination: Theories and Fictions (1980), and Aging and the Elderly: Humanistic Perspectives in Gerontology (1978). From 1986-1995 she coedited Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture. She is presently working on risk in the context of globalization and population aging.

Woodward has received institutional grants from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is a member of the Steering Committee of HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) and from 2018-2022 served on the Board of Directors of the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). She has served on the Executive Committee of the National Society of Phi Beta Kappa (2012-2018), the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association (2009-2013), the Board of Directors of the National Humanities Alliance (2003-2009), and as Chair of the National Advisory Board of Imagining America, a broad-based network of scholars and leaders of cultural institutions devoted to fostering the development of campus-community partnerships (2000-2005). From 1995-2001 she was President of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, an international organization of over 250 members, and she continues to serve on its International Advisory Board. Woodward was the Director of the Center for Twentieth Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee from 1981-2000, where she taught in the Department of English and interdisciplinary graduate program in Modern Studies. She has also taught at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociales in Paris. She holds a BA in Economics from Smith College and a PhD in Literature from the University of California at San Diego.

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Recent Essays

“'Old Trees Are Our Parents’: Old Growth, New Kin, Forest Time,” Age, Culture, Humanities, vol. 6, Dec. 2022.
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"The Feeling of Freedom, Planetary Affect, and Feminist Emotion: Recent Work by Video Artist Cecelia Condit." Feminist Media Histories, vol. 7, no. 2, Spring 2021, pp. 65-91.
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"Ageing in the Anthropocene: The View From and Beyond Margaret Drabble's The Dark Flood Rises." Literature and Ageing, edited by Elizabeth Barry and Margery Vibe Skagen, D. S. Brewer, 2020, pp. 37-63.
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“Afterword: Literary Antidotes to the Toxin That Is Ageism.” Studies in American Fiction, vol. 46, no. 2, Fall 2019, pp. 373-81.
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“On Feminist Collaboration, Digital Media, and Affect.” Feminist Interventions in Participatory Media: Pedagogy, Publics, Practice, edited by Lauren S. Berliner and Ron Krabill, Routledge, 2018, pp. 70-90.
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"Rereading Simone de Beauvoir's The Coming of Age." Age, Culture, Humanities, issue 3, 2016. https://ageculturehumanities.org/WP/rereading-simone-de-beauvoirs-the-coming-of-age/
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"We Are All Nontraditional Learners Now: Community Colleges, Long-Life Learning, and Problem-Solving Humanities." A New Deal for the Humanities: Liberal Arts and the Future of Public Higher Education, edited by Gordon Hutner and Feisal G. Mohamed, Rutgers UP, 2016, pp. 51-71. 
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“Aging.” Keywords in Disability Studies, edited by Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin, New York UP, 2015, pp. 33-34.
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"Feeling Frail and National Statistical Panic: Joan Didion in Blue Nights and the American Economy at Risk.” Age, Culture, Humanities, issue 2, 2015, pp. 347-67.
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"A Public Secret: Assisted Living, Caregivers, Globalization." International Journal of Ageing and Later Life, vol. 7, no. 2, 2012, pp. 17-51.
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"Work-Work Balance, Metrics, and Resetting the Balance." PMLA, vol. 127, no. 4, 2012, pp. 994-1000.
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"Assisted Living: Aging, Old Age, Memory, Aesthetics." Occasion, vol. 4, May 2012, https://arcade.stanford.edu/occasion/assisted-living-aging-old-age-memory-aesthetics.
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"Introduction: Thinking Feeling, Feeling Thinking." Statistical Panic: Cultural Politics and Poetics of the Emotions, Duke UP, 2009, pp. 1-28.
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"Structures of Feeling, 'New' Feelings" and "Sympathy for Nonhuman Cyborgs." Statistical Panic: Cultural Politics and Poetics of the Emotions, Duke UP, 2009, pp. 135-64.
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“The Future of the Humanities-—in the present & in public.” Daedalus, vol. 138, Winter 2009, pp. 110-23.
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“Performing Age, Performing Gender.” NWSA Journal, vol. 18, no. 1, 2006, pp. 162-89.
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“A Feeling for the Cyborg.” Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information, edited by Robert Mitchell and Phillip Thurtle, Routledge, 2004, pp. 181-97.
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“Against Wisdom: The Social Politics of Anger and Aging.” Cultural Critique, vol. 51, Spring 2002, pp. 186-218.
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“Calculating Compassion.” Indiana Law Journal, vol. 77, no. 2, 2002, pp. 223-45.
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“Traumatic Shame: Toni Morrison, Televisual Culture, and the Cultural Politics of the Emotions.” Cultural Critique, vol. 46, Fall 2002, pp. 210-40.
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“Statistical Panic.” differences, vol. 11, no. 2, 1999, pp. 177-203.
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“Telling Stories, Aging, Reminiscence and the Life Review.” Doreen B. Townsend Center Occasional Papers, vol. 9, Doreen B Townsend Center for the Humanities, UC Berkeley, 1997.
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“Anger…and Anger: From Freud to Feminism.” Freud and the Passions, edited by John O'Neill, Pennsylvania UP, 1996, pp. 73-95.
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“Tribute to the Older Woman: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Ageism.” Images of Aging: Cultural Representations of Later Life, edited by Mike Featherstone and Andrew Werrick, Routledge, 1995, pp. 79-96.
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“Late Theory, Late Style: Loss and Renewal in Freud and Barthes.” Aging & Gender in Literature: Studies in Creativity, edited by Anne Wyatt-Brown and Janice Rossen, U of Virginia P, 1993, pp. 82-101.    
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