Dr. J. Ashley Foster is an Assistant Professor of 20th & 21st-Century British Literature with Emphasis in Digital Humanities. She received her PhD 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.

From 2014-17, Ashley served as Visiting Assistant Professor of Writing and Fellow in the Writing Program at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. 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 to December 11, 2015 in Magill Library at Haverford College.

Recent peer-reviewed articles include the co-authored “Changing the Subject: Archives, Technology, and Radical Counter-Narratives of Peace” in Radical Teacher (2016) and “Writing in the ‘White Light of Truth’: History, Ethics, and Community in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts” in the Woolf Studies Annual(2016).

In her spare time, Ashley enjoys a dedicated yoga practice, dancing, cross-country skiing, and hiking.

E. Makaela Bowen is a Graduate Student pursuing an M.A. in English Literature and a Certificate of Advanced Study in Composition. She teaches in the First Year Writing Program as a Teaching Associate for the Fresno State English Department.

In Spring 2018, Makaela graduated Magna Cum Laude, earning a B.A. degree in English Education with an emphasis in Literature. She is a member of the Sigma Tau Delta International English Honor Society and the Fresno State Students of English Studies Association (SESA).

Makaela’s research interests include World and Victorian Literature, especially the writings of Christina Rossetti. More specifically, her work seeks to examine texts from writers who embrace the feminine, highlight the value of women friendships and bring a vision of inclusive femininity into the public sphere.

For fun, Makaela enjoys travelling and exploring nature. Her favorite adventures include climbing a Cinder Cone volcano and exploring lava tubes in Northern California.

Robert Breuer is in his second year of graduate school pursuing his master's degree in English literature. Robert presented at the Fresno State SESA Symposium as a graduate student, the undergraduate honors symposium, and the Undergraduate Conference of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the Americas (UCMLA). Currently, he is creating a thesis with a digital-humanities inspired component to critique campus unrest and academic freedom from the 1960s to the modern day.

Additionally, Robert is a technology enthusiast with a job as a tech. employee and a Fresno State Teaching associate. In his free time, trains and competes in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.

Erin Chavez has a BA from Fresno State in English. She has returned this year to pursue an MA in English Literature with a Certificate of Advanced Study in Composition. She currently works at the Writing Center on campus where she helps students tackle their college writing assignments. She loves helping people with their reading and writing and plans to teach English at the college level once she graduates.

Erin is married and has two children. In her spare time, she enjoys being with her family, traveling, and creating colored pencil portraits. She is a former competitive Highland dancer and has won many awards throughout California. This experience awakened a love of Scottish culture that she hopes to incorporate into her graduate studies. Though she has not yet had the opportunity to visit Scotland, she is looking forward to spending the upcoming winter intersession exploring London, England with fellow Fresno State students.

Megan Evans is a Graduate Student in the M.A. program, emphasizing in Rhetoric and Writing. She has presented at several conferences over her academic career with papers centered on student voices in writing. Megan is currently teaching First-Year writing and leads a student-run organization that hosts an annual winter symposium for students at CSU Fresno. Megan was first introduced to digital humanities when she took a class in Spring 2018. After learning more about the broad definition associated with the new field, Megan has been on a journey to create her own understanding. She was briefly introduced into the world of archiving and digital repositories through her own studies, but she is excited to be working closely with the Special Collections for this exhibit to learn even more.

Angel Garduno is a second-year graduate student in the English M.A. program, literature option at California State University, Fresno. Though his literary interests vary, he is especially interested in literary theory, 20th century existential writings and Mexican-American literature. He has presented at the UCMLA and SESA conferences at Fresno State and will present at the upcoming PAMLA conference in Washington. He is currently writing his thesis which studies the narratives of three novels and how each narrative, to varying degrees, resists a fixed identity formation in favor of a more fluid becoming of self. This analysis will necessarily engage the larger philosophical conversation on the purpose of art and whether art can ever be apolitical. Invoking Elizabeth Grosz’s extension of Darwinian biological thought to the metaphysical contemplation of the existence of the self, this project will posit that the novels’ narratives propose an aimlessness instead of a fixed trajectory of life and, essentially, stress the importance of excess and “play.”

On his free time, Angel likes to watch movies and rewrite famous songs so that they feature his pug, Gus.

Michaella Gonzalez is a student here at CSU Fresno, currently working towards her Masters in English with an emphasis in Literature. She received her bachelor’s degree in Literature from UC Santa Cruz. She has presented papers at both the Fresno State SESA conference and nationwide PAMLA conference in Washington. She is interested in queer theory and feminist critique. Gonzalez is currently working on her thesis which analyzes war narratives and militarism to explore the ways in which fictional representations of war inform national understandings of gender and sexuality.

Josiah D. Hillner is an American modernist with emphasis in both Digital Humanities and poetry and poetics. Josiah has published 3 poems and 2 short stories for the publication Watermarked. He has two digital humanities projects completed to date: Monstrorum Mundi: Encountering Monsters in Old English Texts and An Axiom of Avant-Garde. At the intersection of modernist literary studies, Digital Humanities, and poetry and poetics, Josiah looks to utilize digital tools to discover and illuminate the intricate complexities involved in modern aesthetic culture, art, literature, and poetry. Josiah has produced multiple papers, including Photonic Poetics: Capturing light in the Poetry of Robin Blaser, which earned him intercollegiate recognition from both the University of Massachusetts Boston and Bridgewater State University. Josiah’s current research involves the avant-garde movement the Berkeley Renaissance and the increasing need for “public space.”

Isabella Lo is a student in the Composition and Rhetoric Master's Program. She is currently a Teaching Assistant at Fresno State University teaching freshmen composition. Her thesis that she is working on focuses on Gaming Rhetorics and the effects it has on current cultures. Other projects she is working are a conference paper for NCTE as well as curating the Topolobampo Exhibition. She hopes to get into a PhD program once she graduates from Fresno State University. You can find her spending her free time on League of Legends, an online game as well as baking or reading.

Leean Lewis-Ramirez was born in Fresno, California on February 27, 1992. She teaches seventh grade Language Arts and AVID at Delta Sierra Middle School in Stockton, California, is the head of the AVID department, and is the yearbook coordinator. Previously, she taught English and Drama at Liberty High in Madera Ranchos, and was a class advisor. Currently, Leean is working on her Masters in Literature at California State University, Fresno. Her emphasis is in dystopian literature, specifically on how to effectively teach the genre in the secondary classroom by connecting it to politics and social awareness. In November of 2018, she will be presenting on the science fiction panel at the PAMLA conference in Bellingham, Washington. She has also published an adolescent fantasy novel, Fate Unknown (2017), and continues to write for the series. Her hopes are to earn her PHD in literature, and later work towards her MFA in fiction.