Ashley Williard is a scholar of the early modern French world specializing in the Caribbean. Her interdisciplinary research draws attention to dynamics of violence and contestation in slavery and colonialism. Williard’s first book, Engendering Islands: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Violence in the Early French Caribbean (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World Series, University of Nebraska Press, 2021), examines imbricated constructions of disability, gender, and race in the seventeenth-century Antilles.

At SCAS, Williard will work on her second book, Disruptive Minds: Madness and Mental Disability in the Early French Atlantic. Informed by mad and critical disability studies, this project documents the lives of persons deemed mad or incompetent in the Caribbean, France, Guiana, and West Africa. Through close readings of archival documents, Williard adapts the tools of microhistory to trace individual trajectories, unpacking diverse worldviews and survival strategies that crisscrossed the Atlantic.

This project has been supported by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, RaceB4Race Second Book Institute, and the University of South Carolina (Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, McCausland College of Arts and Sciences, and Office of the Vice President for Research).


This information is accurate as of the academic year 2026-27.