Lead Curator

J. Ashley Foster is Visiting Assistant Professor of Writing and Fellow in the Writing Program at Haverford College. She defended her dissertation Modernism’s Impossible Witness: Peace Testimonies from the Modernist Wars in May 2014, under the guidance of Jane Marcus, which is currently being worked into a book manuscript. The Modernism's Impossible Witness project provided the central questions, themes, and initial research for Testimonies in Art and Action. Indeed, the "Peace Testimonies in Literature and Art" course was derived from this dissertation research. Her articles have been published in Virginia Woolf Writing the World, Virginia Woolf & 20th Century Women Writers, the Virginia Woolf Miscellany, the Virginia Woolf Bulletin, and Interdisciplinary/Multidisciplinary Woolf. “Stopped at the Border” has been reprinted in Adbusters magazine. Her forthcoming article, "Recovering Pacifisms Past: Modernist Networks, the Society of Friends, and the Peace Movement of the Spanish Civil War" will be published in Quakers in Literature, April 2016. Ashley and the students from her spring and fall 2015 Peace Testimonies in Literature & Art Writing Seminar are the curators of the interactive student digital humanities and Special Collections exhibition Testimonies in Art & Action: Igniting Pacifism in the Face of Total War. This exhibition, which runs in Haverford College’s Magill Library from October 6-December 11, 2015, explores pacifism, social justice, and the relationship between art and activism in the interwar era. Ashley’s work examines the intersections between pacifism, modernism, and war, and tries to recuperate the lost threads of modernism’s pacifist history.