Dr. Ashley Byczkowski

Biography

 Dr. Ashley Byczkowski teaches all levels of beginner, intermediate, and advanced French, French and Francophone cultural history, and French and Francophone literature and cinema at Niagara University. In Dr. Byczkowski’s classroom, students engage with materials and topics that push them to reexamine their place in the world and leave with a better understanding of their cultural identities and the role that culture biases play in their day to day experiences. 

Her research stems from an interest in written representations of the self and feminine relationships in women’s writing from the entire French-speaking world.  Her first book project “Feminine Selfhood: Mothers and Daughters in Francophone Women’s Life Writing” takes a psychoanalytic and feminist approach to analyzing life writing and examines the psychological role of the mother-daughter relationship on the author’s construction of self in her life writing. Looking at works by authors such as George Sand, Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, Marie-Célie Agnant, and Kim Thúy, this project considers how each author represents the deeply-rooted, and often unconscious, sentiments that arise when daughters write about their mothers, and what traces of this relationship remain in the authors’ representations of their own selfhood as women in their works. Ultimately, her work explores the possibility for social and psychological repairs to past traumas in the genre of life writing. 

In her free time, Dr. Byczkowski loves spending time with her partner, Will, and their Great Pyrenees, Dauphine (who is featured here on Girl with the Dogs!). Being an avid knitter and hiker, on the weekends she’ll either be trail running in the woods or knitting and watching Great British Bake Off or Lord of the Rings.