Profile

Scholar Profile

John M. Woodruff (Birmingham, Alabama, USA) is an Alt-Ac colonialist scholar, irregular adjunct professor, digital humanities practitioner, and contract linguist. He holds a Ph.D. in Romance Languages, an M.A. in Spanish/Latin-American Studies, and a distinctive B.A.U.H. in Spanish/Mathematics. Dr. Woodruff is one of the world’s foremost experts—and one of only two colonialists—on the periconquest Maya narrative known as Popol Vuh.

Dr. Woodruff’s interdisciplinary scholarship examines the oldest-surviving Popol Vuh manuscript through the theoretical lenses of paratext, marginalia, and rhetoric. He is the only scholar to apply contemporary marginalia theory to Popol Vuh and his post-doctoral research examined marginal annotations and modal shifts to expose an unacknowledged authorial entity within the first folio recto. Other areas of interest and study include Maya anthropology, the Cuban missile crisis, and the Generation of 1927 poets and dramatists.

In the classroom, Dr. Woodruff’s teaching philosophy infuses self-concordance theory developed by Tal Ben-Shahar at Harvard University which further informs Woodruff’s views on faculty-student collaboration.

Outside of the ivied halls of academia, Dr. Woodruff offers expert simultaneous and consecutive oral interpretation as well as document translation for medicine, civil law, business, and non-profit. He is available for guest lectures on Maya civilization, discovery/exploration of the Americas (1492–1524), and colonial Spanish-America (1542–1800).

In addition to his formal academic inquiry and practice, Dr. Woodruff has considerable technical expertise having created various workflow utilities, most notably Excellent Grades and FormMail++.

Consulting

Statement of Research

My principal expertise lies with the periconquest narrative commonly known as Popol Vuh which recounts the mythological, historical, and religious heritage of the Quiché Maya who inhabited the highland region of present-day Guatemala City. Although it is one of the foremost works of the Spanish-American colonial period, shockingly little critical attention has been given to its colonial context. Popol Vuh survives by way of Dominican priest Father Francisco Ximénez. The position most commonly taken as to Popol Vuh’s survival is that a missionary-educated Indian used his knowledge of European alphabetic writing to capture and preserve, in written form, the oral recitation of an elder sometime in the 1550s. In the late 1600s or early 1700s, Father Ximénez is popularly theorized to have obtained this phonetic redaction from a parishioner, which he then would have transcribed and translated in parallel Quiché and Spanish. After Ximénez’s death, his writings remained in the library of his convent near the capital until 1829 when more ›

Statement of Teaching Philosophy

In the months following my velvet hooding, I had the wonderful experience of reading Happier by Tal Ben-Shahar,1 a Harvard lecturer on positive psychology. According to Ben-Shahar, there is no formula for happiness, but being happier is a function of self-actualization and the fulfillment found therein. That premise revealed to me the principles that characterized my best classes as a student. Moreover, it explained why the writing stage of my dissertation was an extraordinarily enjoyable and fulfilling experience. Admittedly there were moments of frustration, but in all, I thrived on the challenge and looked forward to working on it each day. Having seen how self-actualization produced such a positive experience for me, I believe that Ben-Shahar’s principles will help me to instill the same functions into the courses that I teach.more ›

Statement of Digital Humanities

A quick search through The Chronicle of Higher Education yields an overwhelming number of results containing the phrase “digital humanities” (with and without capital letters and sometimes hyphens) but none really seems to proffer a definition that is relevant and helpful to the lone scholar. And if the casually bantered digital-this and digital-that in reader comments are any indication, many of us amble along without a clear notion of how this new thing operates at the level of the individual scholar. As Kathleen Fitzpatrick explains, “Digital Humanities” does not signify merely “rendering stuff digital” but rather “a nexus of fields within which scholars use computing technologies to investigate the kinds of questions that are traditional to the humanities.” But what does that mean for the analog-trained humanist?more ›

Rethinking the Context of Popol Vuh

Doctoral Dissertation. Although seventeenth-century Dominican priest Francisco Ximénez is credited for conservation of Popol Vuh, no critical attention is given to his personal agency and his ecclesiastical agenda. The oversight is particularly disconcerting where he plainly states in his prologue, “Esta mi obra, y trabaxo discurro q’ avra muchos q’ la tengan por la mas futil y vana de las q’ he trabaxado, asi lo pensaran muchos; y yo lo discurro al contrario, porq’ entiendo ser la mas util, y neçesaria.” My investigation is founded on answering the question: Why did Father Ximénez believe conservation of this text to be his crowning achievement? I answer this question by examining the four prologues of the Ayer manuscript to uncover Ximénez’s significant interaction with the text.more ›

Doctoral Hooding

Woodruff’s doctoral hooding at the May 9, 2009 commencement (Coleman Colosseum, The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa)

SHORT CV