J. Ashley Foster is Associate Professor of 20th & 21st-Century British Literature with Emphasis in Digital Humanities in the Department
of English at California State University, Fresno. She received her Ph.D. from The
Graduate Center, City University of New York, in 2014.
Working at the intersection of literary studies, digital humanities, peace studies,
and women’s studies, Ashley’s scholarship and teaching employs digital tools to trace
the relationships between artistic and activist networks of the long 20th-Century and to facilitate intertextual readings between literature and archives.
Ashley’s book project, Modernism’s Impossible Witness: Peace Testimonies from the Spanish Civil War, illuminates a concern for peace and social justice in the study of modernism.
Ashley and students from the graduate seminar “Utopias: Literature, Technology, Archives”
curated the Digital Humanities and Special Collections exhibition Surveying Utopias: A Critical Exploration, which ran in the Library at Fresno State from February 22-July 26, 2019. The exhibition
catalogue was published by The Press at California State University (2019) and can
be accessed on the Surveying Utopias website.
From 2014-2017, Ashley served as Visiting Assistant Professor of Writing and Fellow
in the Writing Program at Haverford College. Ashley and the students from her “Peace
Testimonies in Literature & Art” Writing Seminar curated the interactive digital humanities
and special collections exhibition Testimonies in Art & Action: Igniting Pacifism in the Face of Total War, which ran from October 6-December 11, 2015 in Magill Library at Haverford College.
