Professor Wood is a specialist in the history of the Early American Republic. Her works span many subfields, including gender and women's history, the history of the American South and slavery, economic history, and politics and political culture. Her Masterful Women: Slaveholding Widows from the American Revolution through the Civil War (2004) reinterprets the political construct of mastery in the southeastern United States in light of slaveholding widows' distinctive legal, economic, and social position as "masters" of slaveholding households. Her current book manuscript, "At the Crossroads," argues that in contrast to the temperance narrative which depicted taverns as lesions on the republic, taverns and their keepers played pivotal roles in the "transportation revolution," the "market revolution," and the evolution of party politics in the early republic. Her teaching interests stretch back into the colonial period and encompass the history of slavery in and beyond North America, women's and gender history, social history, and courses centered on the Early Republic.
