Ashley Dennis was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of Black women’s intellectual history, social and political movements, and the history of Black education. Her current book manuscript explores how and why Black women teachers, librarians, and children’s book authors promoted the study of Black history and culture among children during the mid-twentieth century.
Dennis’s work has been published in The History of Education Quarterly, Historical Studies in Education, Black Perspectives, and The Washington Post. She also wrote a digital tour for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Dennis has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University, and the Black Metropolis Research Consortium. In recognition of her scholarship on Madeline Morgan and the mandatory Black history curriculum in Chicago during World War II, she won the 2021 Henry Barnard Prize from the History of Education Society and the 2019 Drusilla Dunjee Houston Memorial Scholarship Award from the Association of Black Women Historians.