Misty Anderson

Candidate statement

Misty G. Anderson is the James R. Cox Professor and Head of English at the University of Tennessee, where she also holds courtesy appointments in the Theatre and Religious Studies departments. Anderson is the author of Imagining Methodism in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Enthusiasm, Belief, and the Borders of the Self (Johns Hopkins, 2012) and Female Playwrights and Eighteenth-Century Comedy: Negotiating Marriage on the London Stage (Palgrave, 2002), and is co-editor of the Routledge Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama and Theatre, vols. 1 and 2 (2017 and 2019), with Daniel O’Quinn and Kristina Straub. She has held fellowships at the Beinecke Library, the Lewis Walpole Library, and the Newberry Library. She edited Restoration for 13 years and has published in or reviewed for numerous journals, including ECS, ECF, ECTI, SECC, ECL, RECTR, and Modern Philology. She is one of the founders of the R/18 Collective, a dramaturg for the Clarence Brown and Red Bull Theatres, and a producer of a number of staged readings of Restoration and eighteenth-century plays. She has served ASECS as a past Board member (2016-20), member of the Executive Director search (2020-21), chair of the Women’s Caucus (2015-17), co-chair of the Masquerade Ball Committee (2013-14 and 2017-18), and co-chair of the first Women’s Caucus fundraising committee (2002), as well as in posts as chair of the MLA Restoration and 18thC, later 18thC, and Religion Literature Executive Committees and on the SEASECS board. She believes that ASECS’s future depends on recommitting to our diversity as a community of interdisciplinary scholars; to fostering new work on the global eighteenth-century; to supporting our non-tenure-track colleagues in better and new ways, and to connecting to larger public audiences and artists to communicate the value of our work.