Ashley Reed

Ashley Reed is Associate Professor of English at Virginia Tech, affiliated with the Department of English in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences. Her work bridges literary studies, religious history, and cultural analysis of 19th-century America.

Her research centers on 19th-century U.S. literature and American religions, with a particular focus on female religious agency, Spiritualism, and settler colonialism. She explores how spiritual movements enabled boundary-crossing in gender, race, and territory, especially through the lens of women writers and religious practitioners.

Reed’s publications reveal a strong trend in interdisciplinary scholarship combining literary analysis, religious studies, and critical colonial theory. Her work frequently examines how spiritual identities were detached from bodies and ancestral lands to serve settler projects, particularly in the context of westward expansion.

• Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship

Reed has authored the monograph Heaven’s Interpreters: Women Writers and Religious Agency in Nineteenth-Century America (Cornell UP, 2020) and published in top journals including J19, ESQ, and Religion Compass. She has contributed chapters to major academic volumes such as American Literature in Transition, 1820–1860 and The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Politics. While no formal advising or grant information is available, her scholarly trajectory indicates active engagement in research and publication. She presented recent work on the Mountain Cove Community, analyzing its role in settler colonial spiritualism.