Dr. Ashley Baggett is the Director of Women and Gender Studies and an associate professor of History. She earned her doctorate in History with a minor in Women and Gender Studies from Louisiana State University in 2014.

Her first book, Intimate Partner Violence in New Orleans: Gender, Race, and Reform, 1840 to 1900, analyzes 421 criminal cases in Orleans Parish that involved intimate partner violence—physical or emotional abuse of a partner in a romantic relationship. Her findings reveal a significant demand among women, the community, and the courts for reform in the postbellum decades. She tracks how gender, race, and location worked together to define and redefine gender expectations and the right to be free from violence, a full a century before the women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s. 

She is working on her second book, North Dakota Women on the Move: North Dakota and the 1977 National Women's Conference, with Dr. Christi McGeorge. The book explores the role of twelve North Dakota women in the first and only federally funded women's rights conference in the United States called the National Women's Conference. 

Her other publications also focus on gender, violence, and socio-legal reform.

Before going to graduate school, Baggett taught on the middle and high school level. Because of her background in education, she is also associate faculty in the School of Education's Social Science Teacher Education program.

I am an associate professor with a joint appointment in English and Women and Gender Studies. I earned my Master’s of Liberal Arts degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and received my doctorate in English Literature from Louisiana State University.

My first book, Vigilante Women in Contemporary American Fiction, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2011. Vigilante Women focuses on female characters who refuse to accept injustice. In the text I argue that vigilante heroines act to remedy violence that women experience on a daily basis: domestic violence, restrictive laws, and lack of political recourse, for example.

Moreover, the authors that I study (Zora Neale Hurston, Shirley Ann Grau, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, & Toni Morrison, among others) challenge ingrained social expectations, creating a more inclusive space for law, morality, and civility to flourish.

I believe that the vigilante characters of these novels model how acts of illegal resistance are representative of the larger movement toward equal rights in American culture, which makes the texts upon which I focus especially relevant and compelling for students.

When I’m not reading, writing, or researching, I devote my time to my adored family. Together we are learning about life on the Great Plains—traveling, hiking, exploring, shoveling, and playing in the snow.