Victoria Barnett-Woods

Vicki Barnett-Woods began teaching in 2008 as a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer serving in the Philippines. She has been involved in educating students, in some capacity, ever since. Though she received her PhD in Literature in 2018, she is interdisciplinary in her approaches to teaching and experiential learning. Vicki’s specialization is in the eighteenth-century Atlantic, with particular emphasis on the Caribbean region. Her first book, an edited collection titled Cultural Economies of the Atlantic World interrogates how material culture—from trade routes to Obeah bags to chocolate and maple sugar—influenced the way we consider networks of understanding and cultural formations in a hemispheric early colonial context. Currently, she is working on two other book projects, Reading the West Indies: Empire, Slavery, and the Novel and Port Authorities: The Caribbean and the Early Novel in the Colonial Atlantic. Both works consider the cultural and epistemological formations of identity framed within colonial contexts. She remains active in many scholarly organizations that center on the life and literature of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.  

Her research immediately informs her approaches to event programming and experiential learning. She is invested in giving cultural contexts and frameworks for understanding the “Age of Revolutions” while guiding students to the multidimensionality of the period. She earned her doctorate at George Washington University and has taught in multiple institutions across the Washington-Baltimore corridor. Most recently, she was an Assistant Teaching Professor at Loyola University in Baltimore, and taught courses such as: “Jane Austen’s Economics: Sex, Death, and Power in the Georgian Era” “Harry Potter and the Literary Imagination” “Reading the Eighteenth-Century Caribbean” and “Life and Literature in the Queer Eighteenth Century.” She is a student-centered educator and is thrilled to see students engage with history head (and hands) on.

Experiential learning, or “learning by doing” operates under the idea that a student can take what they learn in the classroom into the world, turning coursework into a career. In her position as Associate Director of Experiential Learning, she sees Chestertown as the classroom. With immediate access to the Chester River and the rich history of Historic Chestertown, she works with her students to see how history and the environment intersect. When it comes to WAC’s mission of “learning by doing,” Vicki also helps to facilitate opportunities for students as an internship coordinator and program developer.