Patricia J. Woods
Patricia J. Woods has been a faculty member in the Department of Political Science and the Center for Jewish Studies at UF since 2001. Her work centers on the intersection of law, religion, and gender politics, primarily in Israel and the Middle East. She also has teaching and research interests in the way these issues develop in the wider Muslim world, especially within Europe. More specifically, her theoretical interests center on comparative judicial politics and judicial power, and especially the interaction between social and state actors within the legal arena and judicial institutions. Dr. Woods is a member of the Comparative Politics, and the Methods committees in the Department of Political Science. In Comparative Politics, her work falls within comparative judicial politics, and historical institutionalism, theoretically; in terms of methods, she uses primarily political-ethnographic research methods in the field.
At the undergraduate level, she teaches courses in Comparative Politics; general Middle East politics and Israel politics courses; as well as courses on gender politics, religion and politics, and law and religion in Israel and the Middle East. At the graduate level, she teaches seminars on comparative judicial politics and judicial power, and field methods and grant writing.
Woods' book, Judicial Power and National Politics: Courts, Gender and the Religious-Secular Conflict in Israel, was published in 2008 in the SUNY Series in Israel Studies. She is co-editing a special issue collection centering on sources of judicial power cross-nationally. She has articles appearing in Droit et Société; Field Methods; Israel Studies Form; Studies in Law, Politics, and Society; Boundaries and Belonging (Migdal, ed., Cambridge 2004); and The Worlds Cause Lawyers Make (Sarat and Scheingold, eds., Stanford 2005). She has been a visiting scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University; Group d'Analyse des Politiques Publiques, ENS-Cachan, France; Birkbeck College of Law, University of London; the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Department of Political Science; and Tel Aviv University Department of Sociology and Anthropology. Research languages include Hebrew, French, and (written) Arabic.
