Dr. Elizabeth Woodward

Biography

Elizabeth Woodward is an Assistant Professor of Practice in the Department of Art and Design at Purdue University, where she also engages with the Cornerstone Integrated Liberal Arts program. She specializes in art history with a focus on the history of art and architecture in the European Middle Ages. Elizabeth holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Chicago and a Master’s degree in Art History from Florida State University, along with undergraduate degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before joining Purdue, she served as a Visiting Assistant Professor in Art Visual Culture at Bates College in Maine from 2019 to 2023, and at Lake Forest College in Illinois from 2018 to 2019. Her teaching interests encompass early and late medieval art, Romanesque and Gothic architecture, Islamic art, as well as the theories and methods of art history, including representations of the afterlife. Elizabeth's research predominantly focuses on the material culture of medieval romance, particularly illuminated vernacular manuscripts and their intersection with artistic and literary practices in the Middle Ages. Her research has been supported by grants from the University of Chicago and the Mellon Council on Library & Information Resources. Recently, she published a work that addresses the iconography of illuminated manuscripts from the Roman de la Rose, which appears in Approaches to Teaching the Romance of the Rose as part of the MLA Approaches to Teaching World Literature, 2023.

Research Interests

Experience