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Patricia
J. Woods took her Ph.D. in Middle East Politics at the University of
Washington in 2001, together with graduate certificates in Comparative
Law and Society Studies, and Comparative Gender Politics. Prior
to that work, she did Master's and Bachelor's level training in both
Jewish and Islamic Studies. She is Associate Professor of Political Science and Jewish
Studies at the University of Florida,
and Co-Coordinator of the Near and Middle East Working Group. She
specializes in comparative judicial politics, Israel, and Middle East
politics, particularly relating to the intersection of religion, law,
and gender politics. Her research on these themes centers on
intellectual, political, and
communal
links between state and social actors.
In her teaching and research, she is most interested in
bottom-up socio-political change and the ways that social actors
can have an impact on the construction or re-construction of state
institutions, in Israel and across the Middle East.
------ Dr.
Woods has
been a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies,
Harvard
University; Visiting Fellow, Birkbeck College of Law, University of
London;
Visiting Foreign Researcher, Group d'Analyses des Politiques Publiques,
ENS-Cachan, France; Visiting Scholar, Hebrew University Department of
Political
Science; and visiting affiliate, Tel Aviv University, Department of
Sociology
and Anthropology. She has spent time at Haifa University, and at
Birzeit University in the West Bank. She has been on the
Executive Board of the Association for Israel Studies, as well as
Program Chair of one of its international conferences. She has
received fellowships for her research from funding agencies including
the National Science Foundation and the Social Science Research
Council. In
graduate school, she
was co-founder and president of the Association for Israel Studies
Graduate Student Organization, 1996-2001; she
was Graduate-Faculty Liaison for the Middle East Studies
Association Graduate Student Organization, 1995; and she was
Graduate-Faculty Liaison for the Middle East Program at the University
of Washington. For more on her publications, see below on this page. --------- Dr.
Woods is dedicated to the undergraduate and graduate student missions
at the University of Florida. Her former undergraduates have gone
on to do research on women in Bangladesh, gender and Islamic movements
in Turkey, ethnic politics and the women's movement in Israel, languge
study in various parts of the Middle East, work for the United Nations,
law school, clerkships with Florida judges, civil society organizing in
Orthodox or secular Israel, and work with U.S. NGOs or government
organizations. Former graduate students who she has helped to
advise have gone on to work at state universities in the U.S.,
conduct civil society organizing in Sudan; her graduate students tend
to work on judicial politics, bottom-up aspects of state-society
relations, historical institutionalism, or Middle East politics.
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