Ashley R. Smith earned her Ph.D. in Screen Cultures from Northwestern University in 2024. She also holds an M.A. in Cinema Studies from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and a B.A. in English from Rider University.
Prior to joining Ithaca College, Dr. Smith previously taught courses on film history and theory, representation in media, and horror cinema at Northwestern University, DePaul University, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. At IC, her teaching focuses on introductory film courses in formal stylistics as well as more advanced courses on film history and theory.
Dr. Smith's research interests emphasize critical studies of race, representation, and identity construction in American and global media with a specialization in horror cinema and horror studies. Dr. Smith's current book project, White with Terror: Monstrous Figurations of Whiteness in Post-Studio American Horror, examines how the figures of the “hillbilly,” serial killer, and “yuppie,” surfaced as incarnations of monstrous whiteness stratified by socioeconomic difference in postwar American horror. She has published on topics related to horror in Serial Killers in Contemporary Television: Familiar Monsters (Routledge) and presented her work at conferences including the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Film and History, and Fear 2000.
Dr. Smith is an advisory board member for the Horror Studies journal (Intellect) and also serves as an academic consultant and an advisory board member for the digital humanities database Cut-Throat Women: A Database of Women Who Make Horror .