Stephanie Wood


Director, Wired Humanities Projects, Center for Equity Promotion, College of Education, University of Oregon

Stephanie [swood(at)uoregon.edu] joined the Honoring Tribal Legacies (HTL) project in 2010 when WHP was located within the University of Oregon Libraries. The project was then under the leadership of CHiXapkaid (Skokomish), who was a professor in the College of Education. As the project took shape, Stephanie was brought in as Co-Principal Investigator and, early in 2015, she was given the Principal Investigator role. Currently, she manages the funds made available to the University of Oregon by the National Park Service for the support of HTL. Our present funding runs through the end of 2018 and is devoted to 1) supporting the dissemination of the Handbook volumes and the demonstration Teachings and, 2) the design of new Teachings.

While Stephanie’s expertise in this project falls into the area of grant writing, grants management, and digital humanities, she has been a life-long advocate for infusing the history of the Americas with more indigenous perspectives. She has a Ph.D. in History and taught graduates and undergraduates at the University of Maine and the University of Oregon. In addition to coordinating most of the daily activities of WHP, Stephanie is the lead scholar on all of WHP’s projects that have Mesoamerican content. She was the Principal Investigator of the four-year, NEH-NSF funded project (2008–2012) to build an online Nahuatl Dictionary that now has more than 36,000 words and enjoys more that 100,000 visitors per year (70K of them, the majority in Mexico, are regular users). John Sullivan and his team in Zacatecas contributed the modern Eastern Huastecan Nahuatl to the dictionary and a digital version of a sixteenth-century vocabulary by Alonso de Molina.  Frances Karttunen contributed her Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl. Stephanie and the Oregon team have contributed thousands of attestations of word usage from manuscripts. James Lockhart bequeathed his files with the intention of seeing some of the material digitized; Stephanie is gradually incorporating some of this into the dictionary. The lexicon continues to grow under Stephanie’s management.

Stephanie was also the Principal Investigator for the NEH-funded (2006–2008) Mapas Project, an online collection of indigenous-authored pictorial manuscripts from New Spain. She is now building, with the WHP team’s assistance, the Early Nahuatl Library, of alphabetic manuscripts authored within indigenous communities from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. The Lockhart Collection is also important for this project. Two other new projects are:  Presente! Art and the Disappeared and Text in the Textiles.

Stephanie has directed five NEH-funded Summer Institutes for U.S. school teachers, “Mesoamerican Cultures and their Histories,” one held in Oregon (2008) and four held in Oaxaca, Mexico (2010, 2011, 2014, and 2015).

Finally, Stephanie is the author of one monograph, dozens of articles, and she has co-edited five anthologies.  For more information, please see her online curriculum vitae.