Faculty

Biography

Ashley Conklin (she/her) has been a writing instructor and member of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee in the Writing, Speaking, and Argument Program for many years and is now an Assistant Professor. She currently teaches first-year composition and Communicating Your Professional Identity for Engineering and co-teaches the practicum in writing for new WSAP instructors. In her teaching, Ashley engages with interdisciplinary themes, multimodal texts, and global perspectives. She grounds her teaching of writing in an awareness of rhetorical situation, focusing especially on audience, genre, and purpose, in order to help students understand reader expectations and their choices as writers. One of her goals is to help students become empowered, flexible writers through an understanding of how the contexts in which they write provide a range of choices for effective communication.

Ashley completed her Ph.D. at the University of Rochester, a M. A. in English from Boston College, and she is currently completing a MLIS in Information and Library Sciences at the University at Buffalo. Her background is in English and Information Sciences, specializing in studies of the intersection of race, religion, and gender in the construction of late medieval English identity. She also has a keen interest in how the ways in which we organize and disseminate information influences research practice and how an awareness of the inequities in how we structure information can lead to more equitable and inclusive research.