Profile

Dr. John WoodruffJohn Woodruff 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. More recently, Dr. Woodruff has taken an interest in gender law and policy.

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++.