BIO
Elizabeth Anne Wood, Ph.D., is a sociologist, author, end-of-life doula, and transitions coach whose work sits at the intersection of how we live and how we die.
For over 25 years, she has taught sociology at Nassau Community College, where she also served as Department Chair and Acting Dean of Instruction, and where she was recognized for her teaching with a SUNY Chancellor’s Award. Her academic work centers on gender, sexuality, relationships, social change, and death and dying — questions she has spent her career bringing out of the classroom and into people’s actual lives.
Her two books reflect the threads that run through everything she does. Bound: A Daughter, a Domme and an End-of-Life Story (She Writes Press, 2019) is a memoir about accompanying her mother through her final chapter — and what that experience revealed about power, intimacy, and what a good death can look like. Between Us: Healing Ourselves and Changing the World Through Sociology, co-edited with Marika Lindholm (University of Chicago Press, 2024), brings together 45 sociologists to share the personal stories and practical tools we need to build communities grounded in justice, connection, and care.
As a certified end-of-life doula, Elizabeth trained with Alua Arthur and the team at Going with Grace, completed the University of Vermont’s End-of-Life Doula Certificate program, and holds the National End of Life Doula Alliance’s Proficiency designation. She has accumulated over 150 hours working alongside inpatient hospice and palliative care teams. Her doula practice draws on all of this — and on her own experience of accompanying her mother through dying — to offer support that is academically grounded, practically useful, and deeply human.
Elizabeth also maintains a consulting practice focused on personal and organizational transitions, with a particular emphasis on the sensitive terrain of gender, sexuality, aging, and changing relationships. She has served as Senior Strategist for the Woodhull Freedom Foundation — the nation’s only human rights organization working full-time to protect sexual freedom as a fundamental human right — for over 16 years.
She earned her Ph.D. at Brandeis University in 1999.
Elizabeth Anne Wood, Ph.D. 