About

Carly S. Woods is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Maryland. She is a humanities-based communication scholar with research interests that include history, argumentation, memory studies, and rhetorics of belonging and exclusion within education, politics, and social change. Woods has published her research in prominent academic journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Argumentation and Advocacy, and Rhetoric Review. Her first book, Debating Women: Gender, Education, and Spaces for Argument, 1835-1945, published by Michigan State University Press in 2018, highlights the role of debating organizations in enabling women in the United States and United Kingdom to access higher education during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book received the National Communication Association's James A. Winans-Herbert A. Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address, as well as the American Forensic Association's Daniel Rohrer Memorial Outstanding Research Award. Woods is actively working on a second book, tentatively titled Ambassadors of Argument, which explores international argumentation, debate, and education during the interwar period. Her ongoing research also includes intersectional memory studies and the rhetoric and memory of politician Barbara Jordan. At UMD, she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on rhetoric, public address, and social change, and has received numerous awards for her research, teaching, and service.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Social Science
• Epistemology
• Philosophy
• Linguistics
• Gender studies

Selected publications

• Revisiting twentieth-century argumentation through debate: The University of Puerto Rico’s 1928 tour of the United States

  Argumentation and Advocacy · 2022-10-02

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Speech and debate have been central in shaping traditions of argumentation in the United States. While much of debate history has focused on individual nation-states, attention to twentieth century intercollegiate debate tours offers one way for argumentation scholars to consider the transgeographic flows of argument exchange. This essay makes the case for thinking about the history of debate across borders. In order to contribute to this special issue’s focus on argumentation in the Americas, I offer the example of the University of Puerto Rico’s 1928 debate tour of the eastern United States, in which student debaters were able to ‘speak back’ to U.S. imperialism through embodied performances that compelled audiences to consider different perspectives on education, language, citizenship, and sovereignty.

  PublisherDOI

• Digitality, Diversity, and the Future of Rhetoric and Public Address

  Rhetoric and Public Affairs · 2021 · 2 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  Abstract The pandemic and economic catastrophes of 2020 and the forms of resistance that surged against racist systemic and physical violence indicate, we contend, that studying public address in the present moment requires attention to the mutual contingency of rhetoric and digitality. Relying on interdisciplinary literatures and a global perspective, we direct such attention along three vectors: platforms, commons, and methods. We indicate how theorizing rhetoric and digitality transforms critical and historical traditions. In expanding the purview of the public address tradition while retaining the tradition’s hermeneutic potential, we emphasize the need to challenge disciplinary terms and the desirability of expanded analytical methods. We submit that by not attending sufficiently to the advent and diffusion of digital media technologies, public address scholarship misses opportunities to shape ongoing conversations about how rhetoric mediates public affairs; and that insofar as struggles for racial justice are bound up with, not just mediated by, digitality, the prospects of diversifying rhetoric’s professoriate increase when research on this topic is central rather than peripheral.

  PublisherDOI

• Keeping<i>TABS</i>: Feminist Publishing and Pedagogy in the Wake of Title IX

  Rhetoric Review · 2021-10-02

  article1st authorCorresponding

  TABS: Aids for Ending Sexism in School was a journal founded by Lucy Picco Simpson and the Organization for Equal Education of the Sexes. Attention to this publication sheds light on feminist activism as it transformed in the wake of Title IX legislation in the late 1970s and 1980s. In examining the journal’s ability to facilitate networking, production, and accountability, we gain greater insight into how teachers and students were able to question normative messages about race, gender, class, and ability in educational materials and diversify the range of historical figures discussed in schools.

  PublisherDOI

• Lecturing the Atlantic: Speech, Print, and an Anglo-American Commons, 1830–1870

  Rhetoric and Public Affairs · 2020 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Linguistics
  PublisherDOI

• Barbara Jordan and the ongoing struggle for voting rights

  Quarterly Journal of Speech · 2020 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  This essay examines the voting rights advocacy of Congress member Barbara C. Jordan. Drawing on some of Jordan’s lesser known speeches, including an address commemorating the 75th anniversary of the nineteenth amendment and congressional testimony on the Voting Rights Act of 1975, I highlight how Jordan rhetorically refigured dominant understandings of the meaning of the vote based on gender, race, and ethnicity. Although she was certain to commemorate past suffrage successes, Jordan also contested and nuanced these notions, reminding her audiences that the quest for equitable voting rights was a long, ongoing, coalitional struggle.

  PublisherDOI

• Debating Women

  Michigan State University Press eBooks · 2018-01-01 · 1 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Moving Rhetorica

  Rhetoric Society Quarterly · 2017-05-09 · 6 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding

  Native to ancient dialogues, medieval allegories, and early modern iconologies, Rhetorica has come to represent rhetoric as an area of academic inquiry. In this essay, we consider how contemporary rhetorical scholars and organizations have used Rhetorica and explore the potential of other personifications of rhetoric and persuasion, drawing on rhetoric’s histories to supply new inventive resources for rhetorical inquiry. First, we introduce lesser-known depictions of Rhetorica. Her range gives historical grounding to a scholarly imaginary that has moved beyond yet still uses Mantegna’s Rhetorica. We do not urge rhetoricians to select a new face for the discipline but instead to recognize Rhetorica’s own diversity and history as an on-going aid and asset to rhetorical thinking and theorizing. Second, we advocate a shift from an exclusive focus on Rhetorica to a shared focus on her less disciplinarily profuse predecessor, Peithō (persuasion).

  PublisherDOI

• The Unnaturalistic Enthymeme: Figuration, Interpretation, and Critique after Digital Mediation

  Argumentation and Advocacy · 2016-03-01 · 24 citations

  articleSenior author

  This essay theorizes the unnaturalistic enthymeme, an emergent argument formation surrounding analogico-digital photography. Instead of presuming the naturalism of images, we contend that contemporary audiences have a heightened awareness of the ways that digital photography is altered. Drawing on the quadripartita ratio, or four categories of change associated with rhetorical figuration, we explore a series of image controversies that denaturalize assumptions about photographic realism. We examine how contemporary protesters respond to this shift in interpretive conventions by making the unnaturalistic enthymeme visible through culture jamming commercial billboards. The unnaturalistic enthymeme does not supplant the naturalistic enthymeme, but instead enables a “hypersophistic” attitude in visual culture—one that decides the veridicality of photographs through argument instead of assumptions about technological objectivity.

  PublisherDOI

• The limits of citizenship in Aristotles politics

  History of Political Thought · 2014-01-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article argues for two main theses concerning Aristotles Politics. The first is that outside the explicit discussion of citizenship in 3.1-5 citizen is used without reference to the criterion of legal eligibility which plays a central role in 3.1s account, and is instead used with reference to the non-legal attributes of individuals. The second is that there are differences with respect to virtue among those who claim citizenship based on free birth and that Aristotle holds that a citizen should have a minimal level of virtue, which excludes some of the free born. These theses are then brought to bear on the controversial thesis that the common interest is the interest of the citizens. The conception of citizen related to the common interest must not be tied to eligibility (as per the first thesis) and must include a minimal level of virtue (as per the second) such that the individual can participate in a correct regime. These results taken together suggest that the explicit account in 3.1 should be displaced as the primary account of the citizen.

  Publisher

• Repunctuated Feminism: Marketing Menstrual Suppression Through the Rhetoric of Choice

  Women s Studies in Communication · 2013-09-02 · 32 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This essay examines the rhetoric of choice as it is used by direct-to-consumer campaigns to persuade women to limit menstruation through the consumption of oral contraceptives. Using the tools of feminist rhetorical criticism, I trace how choice is rhetorically constructed to suggest that menstrual suppression is a path to individual empowerment while co-opting second and post-second-wave rhetorics. Finally, I explore the meaning of these constructions of choice and suggest broader implications for ongoing feminist movements.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Gordon R. Mitchell

  18 shared

• John Rief

  Metropolitan State University of Denver

  18 shared

• Eric English

  17 shared

• Matthew P. Brigham

  17 shared

• Catherine E. Morrison

  University of Pittsburgh

  17 shared

• Damien Smith Pfister

  2 shared

• Stephen M. Llano

  St. John's University

  1 shared

• Joshua P. Ewalt

  Northern Michigan University

  1 shared

Labs

• Center for Political Communication & Civic LeadershipPI

Awards & honors

• National Communication Association's James A. Winans-Herbert…
• American Forensic Association's Daniel Rohrer Memorial Outst…