Ashley Williams

Ashley specializes in the art and material culture of the United States and contested Indigenous lands. Her dissertation, Unfree Artists on the Borders of U.S. Empire, 1850-1930, charts new connections between systems of forced art and craft production within enslavement, wartime imprisonment, and incarceration. Her project zooms out to trace the ways that unfree artistic labor was leveraged to build the expanding U.S. empire, while also zooming in to investigate how specific artists navigated these difficult circumstances.

Ashley holds a BA from Agnes Scott College and an MA from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. As a scholar with a curatorial focus, she has assisted with projects at Columbia’s Wallach Art Gallery, the Bard Graduate Center Gallery, Historic Deerfield, the Newport Restoration Foundation, and the Blanton Museum of Art. From 2018 to 2019, she was the John Wilmerding Intern in American Art at the National Gallery of Art. Her work has been published in the Routledge Companion to Art and Disability (2022).

Ashley’s research has been supported by a William H. Truettner Predoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Ashley has also received grants from the U.S. Department of State’s Fulbright Program, the Winterthur Museum, the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, the Decorative Arts Trust, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Texas State Historical Association, and others. In academic year 2024-2025, her work will be supported by a Luce / ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art.