Dr. Margaret Elizabeth Tully

Dr. Meg Tully, pioneering feminist scholar and devoted friend, passed away on October 3, 2024, at 35 years of age. 

Though she was born in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1989, Meg moved to Nashville in 1990 and stayed until her early 20s. She met her husband, Brian Woody, in 2007, and the two remained inseparable through several cross-country moves, years of graduate school, and a wildly undeserved battle with cancer. Meg and Brian are parents to five beautiful cats: Daenerys, Charlie, Nugget, Lydia, and Ozzy. 

In 2022, Meg returned to Nashville for her dream job: Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Belmont University, where she taught gender, media, and comedy and was known for slipping in spicy language throughout her lectures. Her award-winning studies have been published in several academic journals, including Women’s Studies in Communication and Critical Studies in Media Communication.

While Meg loved returning to her alma mater to teach, her favorite part of the job was being able to teach alongside her mother, Sue Trout, who has worked at Belmont for over 30 years. The two often engaged in scholarly discussions at the dinner table about everything from Abbott Elementary to David Foster Wallace. Meg loved researching with her mother and presenting their findings at academic conferences as a wildly hilarious mother-daughter duo. 

Meg was incredibly generous. She made magazine collages for all her loved ones’ birthdays and holidays, many of which are still hanging on their walls. She showered the children in her life with gifts, from custom-made diamond art to spooky Halloween village houses. One Christmas, she handmade her sister a copy of the spell book from the TV show Charmed; when her friend’s children were born, she made them both alphabet books featuring magazine cutouts she had saved throughout the years. 

Meg’s generous spirit, relentless optimism, sharp wit, and steadfast stubbornness will be missed terribly by all those she touched. 

Meg is survived by her husband, Brian Woody; her parents, Sue and Paul Trout; her sister Kate, brother-in-law Matt, and niece Vivienne Ellsworth; her brother Chris and sister-in-law Sarah Tully; and a slew of extended family members across the Trout, Hayes, Tully, and Woody families. 

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you donate blood or platelets to your local American Red Cross.