Alison Conway

Candidate statement

Alison Conway is Professor of English, and Gender and Women’s Studies, at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. She is the author Private Interests: Women, Portraiture, and the Visual Culture of the English Novel, 1709-1791 (2001) and The Protestant Whore: Courtesan Narrative and Religious Controversy in England, 1680-1750 (2010). She is also co-editor, with Mary Helen McMurran, of Mind, Body, Motion, Matter: Eighteenth-Century British and French Literary Perspectives (2016), and co-editor, with David Alvarez, of Imagining Religious Toleration: a Literary History of an Idea, 1600-1830 (2019). Her most recent monograph, Sacred Engagements: Interfaith Marriage, Religious Toleration, and the British Novel, 1750-1820, is forthcoming with the Johns Hopkins University Press. She has been active in the ASECS Women’s Caucus since 1995 and is currently serving as Chair of the ASECS Travel Grants committee. She was President of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies from November 2017 through June 2021 and is currently serving as interim Co-Editor of Eighteenth-Century Fiction, with Corrinne Harol.