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About Me
Hayley Woodward’s research centers on the visual cultures of the Americas, from the ancient world to early modern era. Woodward studies modes of Indigenous visual communication, placemaking, history-writing, materiality, environmental consciousness, and artistic practice, specifically in Postclassic Mesoamerica and in sixteenth-century New Spain. Her first book project, tentatively titled Tracing Histories: Making and Remaking the Codex Xolotl, explores the ways in which different Indigenous painter-scribes and colonial collectors envisioned the pre-Hispanic past via visual culture, as evidenced in a significant, yet understudied painted manuscript. Merging foundational art historical methodologies with textual and archival sources, Woodward’s book questions the nature of Indigenous artmaking by dismantling the idea that this object of study was created as a complete object in a single context. Altogether, it reorients the focus in Mesoamerican manuscript studies towards process rather than finality, and the book sheds light on broader practices of amending, revising, and erasing Indigenous history in the years following the Spanish Invasion. Woodward also is actively researching her second book project, which will explore Postclassic Aztec style art located outside of the imperial capital of Tenochtitlan. This project investigates themes of mobility and reception of artistic style between locales throughout the Aztec political and cultural sphere using art as a lens through which to measure the efficacy and limits of imperial power.
Woodward earned her Ph.D. in Art History and Latin American Studies at Tulane University. Her research has been supported by year-long fellowships at the Getty Research Institute and at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, as well as by short term fellowships and grants from the Newberry Library and the Kress Foundation. She has presented her research in international venues and has published on topics of artistic process, materiality, mapmaking, history writing, and digital humanities in peer-reviewed volumes.