Ashley M. Williard’s research examines disability, gender, and race in the early modern French Atlantic world. Her first book, Engendering Islands: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Violence in the Early French Caribbean (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World series, University of Nebraska Press, 2021), argues that reconstructions of masculinity and femininity upheld slavery and nascent ideas of race in the seventeenth-century Antilles. Her articles and chapters have been published in venues such as Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal (2020), and L’Esprit Créateur (2021).

Her second book project, currently entitled Disruptive Minds: Madness, Disability, and Slavery in the Early French Atlantic, centers on conceptions of mental incapacity in the context of racial slavery, c. 1656-1789. With deep archival roots, Disruptive Minds deploys novel reading practices to unearth diverse epistemologies, strategies for survival, and the unrelenting challenges posed to colonial order. This project has been supported by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, National Endowment for the Humanities, the ACMRS RaceB4Race Second Book Institute, and the University of South Carolina (Office of the Vice President for Research ASPIRE-I.1, Excel Program, College of Arts and Sciences Faculty Research Travel Initiative).

She is active in multiple scholarly societies, including the Modern Language Association and the Society for Interdisciplinary French Seventeenth-Century Studies. She teaches classes on the French language and the francophone world, including interdisciplinary courses she has created on topics such as slavery, disability, and early modern gender.