Clare Woods

Clare Woods is Associate Professor of Latin in the Department of Classical Studies at Duke University. She teaches courses at both undergraduate and graduate level in Latin literature of just about all periods (from Plautus to Petrarch), as well as courses in the city of Rome, Latin palaeography, and late ancient and medieval intellectual culture.

She was trained at King’s College in London where she read Classics, subsequently taking an MA Degree in which she broadened her interests to include late ancient and medieval texts, manuscripts and culture. For her Ph.D (awarded in 1997) she prepared a critical edition of part of the Latin sermon collection compiled in the 820s by Hrabanus Maurus (abbot of Fulda) for Archbishop Haistulf of Mainz. She has continued to work and publish on that collection, as well as on Paul the Deacon’s Epitome of Festus, and on the Carolingian cult of Mary.

Clare’s research interests centre on Carolingian literature and culture, particularly manuscript culture and the transmission/ exchange of ideas and texts. In addition to more traditional specializations in Latin philology and palaeography, she developed interests in digital games and virtual reality, and – through an FHI sponsored working group, “Experiencing Virtual Worlds”, convened 2009-2011 – she began to explore ways in which the pre-modern is represented in new media. This developing interest in things digital led her to explore new ways of analyzing and representing her own data as a scholar of the earlier Middle Ages. Her latest project investigates early medieval intellectual networks using digital mapping techniques to model patterns in the dissemination of texts.

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