Auriana Woods

About Auriana Woods

Auriana Woods (she/her/hers) is a historian of 19th century African American life and the Director of Getting Word, the African American history department at Monticello (the plantation home of Thomas Jefferson). While her work spans Black American history from slavery to freedom, her focus is on fugitive kinship practices, family separation, and the forced migration of enslaved people from the Upper South to the Lower South and westward between 18••••65.As a public-facing historian, Auriana works to reconstruct our collective understanding of American history and identity through filling historic silences, interrogating the consequences of a popular narrative that omits chattel slavery as a founding institution, and emphasizing the centrality of Black Americans in the founding of the United States. She is particularly intent on “re-membering” the histories of individuals who have been invisibilized by the violence of traditional archives, and engages in a historical practice that “challenges the known and the unknowable.” Auriana is a graduate of Columbia University’s Oral History M.A. Program (2022 cohort) and Brown University (class of 2019), where she concentrated in Africana Studies.

Experience

1. Director of Getting Word, the African American Research and Oral History Department at Monticello

   Thomas Jefferson Foundation

   Dec 2024 — Present · Charlottesville, VA, US

Education

• Stevenson School

  High School Diploma

  2011 — 2015

• Columbia University

  Master of Arts - MA, Oral History

• Brown University

  Bachelor of Arts - BA, Africana Studies

  2015 — 2019