Julia Eleanor Moody
Faculty, Biology

Julia Eleanor Moody
Faculty, Biology

Julia Eleanor Moody was born in Canton, New York in 1869 to Harnel and Adelia (Hewett) Moody. She attended Mount Holyoke College, earning a B.S. in 1894 and then an M.A. in 1909 and writing her master’s thesis on the anatomy and embryology of Cumingia tellinoides, a species of clam. During this time, she also taught Zoology at Mount Holyoke and studied intermittently at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. After earning her M.A., Moody went on to study at Columbia University, graduating with a PhD in Zoology in 1912.

That same year, Dr. Moody accepted two teaching positions, one in the Biology Department at Simmons, and the other in the Zoology Department at Wellesley. She stayed at Simmons for only two years, but maintained her post at Wellesley until her retirement in 1937.

Little is known about Moody’s political and social activities, though she was a supporter of women’s suffrage. She was also a member of the College Club of Boston and was elected to the American Society of Zoologists in 1914. In addition to her teaching work, she also coauthored a series of informational science books for children with Mount Holyoke professor Jeannette Marks, the most popular of which were Little Busybodies (1909) and A Holiday with the Birds (1910). Moody and Marks were committed to instilling in children an interest in science and nature, and they remarked in a newspaper interview in 1909 that they wrote “with the determination that the child should not be bored…they shan’t be told a single uninteresting fact.”

Moody’s date of death is unknown.