Ann Matthews Woodlief


I am an Associate Professor of English (American Literature) in the English department at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA, where I have taught since 1972. My BA and MA in English were taken at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C.; my PhD in English, with a dissertation on the style of Thoreau's Walden, is from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Academic areas of research interest include nineteenth century literature, nature writing, American women writers, reader-oriented literary theory, and the use of computers, especially hypertext, for teaching. I have published articles on Thoreau, Emerson, and teaching (some are on-line). Most recently I published an article on "Teaching Walden as Transcendental Strip Tease" in Approaches to Teaching Walden (MLA Press).

Like any good transcendentalist, I have a wide range of research and writing interests which are not particularly scholarly. My book, In River Time: The Way of the James (on the James River), was published in 1985 by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. My father aroused my interest in family history, and I have been collecting and researching family materials for five years; eighteenth century Virginia history, especially of the Huguenots who settled in Monacan, particularly intrigues me. Now that I live on a marsh creek in rural Virginia, birds and wildflowers have become other areas of passionate observation and study.   


My Favorite Non-Virtual Place: December Sunrise at Guthrie Creek