Rate My Professor Ashley Byczkowski

Ashley Byczkowski, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of French in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at Niagara University. A Niagara University alumna, she earned her B.A. in French with a Spanish minor summa cum laude, followed by an M.A. and Ph.D. in French Language and Literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo. She serves as Faculty Liaison for the NUSTEP French Program and Faculty Advisor for the French Program. Byczkowski teaches all levels of beginner, intermediate, and advanced French language acquisition for second-language and heritage speakers, as well as French and Francophone literature, film, cultural history, and the history of the French-speaking world. In her classroom, students engage with materials and topics that encourage them to reexamine their place in the world, gaining a better understanding of their cultural identities and the role cultural biases play in daily experiences.

Byczkowski's research examines written representations of the self and feminine relationships in women’s writing from the French-speaking world. Her first book project, “Feminine Selfhood: Mothers and Daughters in Francophone Women’s Life Writing (1827-2001),” uses psychoanalytic and feminist approaches to analyze the mother-daughter relationship's influence on the author’s self-construction in life writing. Key publications include “Derridean Deconstruction and Modernist Writer-Sons” in Journal of Modern Literature 46.1 (Fall 2022), “French Colonization of New France (Present-Day Canada)” in Routledge Encyclopedia of the Renaissance World (June 2022), and “Lin, Lana. Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer. New York: Fordham University Press” in Penumbr(a): A Journal of Psychoanalysis and Modernity vol. 1, no. 1 (2020). She contributes to university governance as a member of the Committee on College Teaching & Learning and the Women Studies Committee.