David Michael Woods is a graduate student in the Department of English at UCI. His research explores the relationship between religious meaning and literary expression, particularly honing in on the religious trajectory of romance as a literary genre.
Within the project Documenting War, his role includes assisting the senior scholars, organizing exhibitions, and events, and introducing an early modern and literary studies of war. Woods looks forward to testing the “narrative techniques of soldiers’ letters and personal reflections” against his own line of research in regards to the “narratological features of romance” to find out what kind of resources soldiers have used to reconcile “the disparity between expectation and reality.”
As a graduate fellow, one of his goals is to connect scholars through the diverse opportunities offered by the Sawyer Seminar. He also hopes to explore the kind of narrative reflections of soldiers in a more contemporary frame in order to understand their personal experiences.
When asked how Documenting War would influence his work, he answered that he hoped to gain a sense of how certain narratological structures––from romanticism as a genre to the more contemporary works of soldiers––“were reinvigorated or reconfigured to suit diverse experiences,” cultural views and the expectations of those at war.