After completing her undergraduate education in politics and film at the University of Toronto, Wood undertook a doctorate in Film Studies at the University of Kent, supported by a Doctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. From 1988-2002, Wood taught Media Studies and European Studies at the University of Sussex, England where she also served as Director of the University's Graduate Research Centre in Culture and Communications. She spent 1995/96 as a Fellow of the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University.

Wood's fields of expertise include the legacy of Vichy and the Algerian war in French political culture, contemporary European media and the role played by media in migration processes. She is the author of Vectors of Memory: Legacies of Trauma in Postwar Europe (Berg, 1999), and a biography of Ravensbruck survivor, Germaine Tillion (Editions Autrement, 2003). Wood also collaborated with Tillion on a large-format book of photographs of Algeria in the 1930s which the French newspaper Le Monde described as 'superbly accomplished'. She has also co-edited a number of books, among them, In Search of Central Europe, The Liberation of France: Image and Event, The BFI Companion to Eastern European and Russian Cinema and Media and Migration: The Construction of Mobility and Difference.