Kathleen Woodward

Kathleen Woodward, Professor of English, is Director of the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington.  She is the author of Statistical Panic (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 is also the editor or coeditor of three interdisciplinary collections of essays on aging from the perspective of the humanities--Figuring Age: Women—Bodies—Generations (1999), Memory and Desire: Aging—Literature—Psychoanalysis (1986), and Aging and the Elderly: Humanistic Perspectives in Gerontology.  Woodward has also published work on the life review, on the reevaluation of wisdom, and on autobiography and aging. She is presently completing a book on the cultural politics of the emotions entitled Statistical Panic and Other New Feelings.

Woodward has received grants from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Arts and is a member of the Advisory Boards of the Brookdale Foundation and the International Longevity Center—U.S.A.  From 1995-2001 she was Chair of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, an international organization of over 140 members.

Woodward holds a B.A. in Economics from Smith College and a Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California at San Diego.