Tita Chico (English, University of Maryland)

Candidate statement

Tita Chico is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland and a scholar of Restoration and eighteenth-century British literature, science studies, and feminist and gender theory. Chico’s recent monograph is The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment (Stanford, 2018). She is also author Designing Women: The Dressing Room in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Culture (Bucknell, 2005) and 15+ articles on topics ranging from couplets to putrefaction. With Toni Bowers, she edited the collection of original essays, Atlantic Worlds in the Long Eighteenth Century: Seduction and Sentiment (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Since 2001, she has served as Editor of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, published quarterly by the University of Pennsylvania Press. Her current book project, Technologies of Wonder in an Age of Enlightenment, looks at wonder as a defining epistemology for what we now understand as literature and science in the long eighteenth century. Chico’s research and scholarship have been supported by fellowships from the Institute of English Studies at the School for Advanced Study (UK), the Harry Ransom Center, the Folger Institute, the National Humanities Center, the Newberry Library, Chawton House Library and Research Centre (UK), and the Ford Foundation. At the University of Maryland, Chico has held numerous administrative posts, including a term as Associate Dean of the Graduate School. She has been an ASECS member since 1995, and during that time has served on ASECS’s review committee for Eighteenth-Century Studies, as Cultural Studies Caucus Chair, on the Women’s Caucus Fundraising Committee, and as a mentor for The Dr. Is In. Chico is interested in ASECS actively supporting the work and diversity of graduate students, early career researchers, and non-tenure track faculty—the next generation of eighteenth-century scholars and teachers.