Brief Bio

Ashley A. Hanna Edwards, PhD [she/her/hers], grew up in southeastern Minnesota. She is the daughter of an Egyptian immigrant and a Minnesotan who divorced when she was young. As a result, she has a big, blended, beautiful family and is the oldest sister to three sisters and three brothers. 

Much of Dr. E's identity is liminal: a blend of identities that exist in the in-between, never quite fitting into a singular social category or juxtaposing two identities that are usually not combined: Growing up Middle Eastern American in a rural area in a post 9/11 world. Holding the experiences of a first-generation college student while also being the daughter of an international student because the parents she lived with do not have college degrees. Being part of two families at very different points on the socio-economic spectrum. This liminality is a foundational part of her identity and instrumental in her choice to study interpersonal communication.  

Ashley completed her Bachelors degree in Communication at the University of Minnesota - Duluth while working full-time in television news and banking. After undergrad, she moved to the Twin Cities and continued to work in banking until the Great Recession hit. Ashley left her job and headed to Oahu to complete a Masters degree in Speech Communication (now Communicology) at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. Living in Hawai'i provided an important cultural reset, when for the first time Ashley's liminality was both common and advantageous. She fell in love with teaching and left the island to pursue her doctorate at Michigan State University. At MSU, she developed expertise in interpersonal and computer-mediated communication and quantitative research methods. She also served as a communication consultant for the Ernst & Young Communication Center for the Department of Accounting and Information Systems in the Eli Broad College. 

During her time in Michigan, Ashley met her partner and they married shortly after graduation. They moved to Western New York and Ashley spent four years on the tenure-track at The College at Brockport, State University of New York. In 2018, Ashley and her family left New York to return to the Midwest and join the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Wisconsin - La Crosse.

Ashley currently lives in the Driftless region with her partner and two children. As an elder Millennial, she was among the masses who realized when COVID-19 hit that she had forgotten to keep hobbies. Now, she enjoys digital doodling to make sweatshirts and coffee mugs, reading (mostly) non-fiction for fun, and wildly dancing around the kitchen with her kids.