Dr. 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.
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 monograph, Impossible Witness: Modernist Peace Testimonies from the Spanish Civil War, illuminates a concern for peace and social justice in the study of modernism and is under contract at Clemson University Press.
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 Henry Madden 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. Ashley and the students from her “Peace Testimonies in Literature & Art” Writing Seminar at Haverford College 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.
Ashley’s publications include “Bloomsbury and War” in the Handbook to the Bloomsbury Group, (2018), the co-authored “Challenging a ‘Warist’ Society with Digital Peace Pedagogy” in Radical Teacher (2020), and “Paradoxes and Ambivalent Pacifisms: Mulk Raj Anand and His Two Gandhi’s” in Gandhi’s Global Legacy: Lessons from Our Modern Times and Moral Challenges (2022). “Friendship as First Philosophy: Peace Making and Quaker Traces in Jacob’s Room and Roger Fry” is forthcoming in The Edinburg Companion to Virginia Woolf, Modernism, and Religion. “Archives of Peace and Feminist Modernist Legacies: Woolf, Parker, Yazbek” was published in the peer-reviewed journal Feminist Modernist Studies in July of 2025.
In June of 2024, the 33rd Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf took place at Fresno State, organized by Ashley. The theme was Woolf, Modernity, Technology. Ashley is currently editing the Selected Papers of the 33rd Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf: Woolf, Modernity, Technology, which will be published by Clemson University Press with sponsorship from the International Virginia Woolf Society.
In her spare time, Ashley enjoys a dedicated yoga practice and has just earned her 500-hour yoga teaching certificate.