Sean Moore

Name
Sean Moore
Candidate statement
Sean D. Moore is Professor of English and Former Dean of the University of New Hampshire (UNH) Honors College. His ASECS service includes being Editor of Eighteenth-Century Studies (2017-2021), Member of the Travelling Jam Pot Committee (2014-2015), Chair of the Irish Studies Caucus (2006-2012), and his membership in the Race and Empire Caucus. He is most recently author of Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries: British Literature, Political Thought, and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1731-1814 (Oxford UP, 2019), which was funded by NEH, AAS/NEH, Newport Mansions, MHS, and Library Company of Philadelphia fellowships. His first book, Swift, the Book, and the Irish Financial Revolution: Satire and Sovereignty in Colonial Ireland (Johns Hopkins UP, 2010), which was funded by a Fulbright Scholarship to Ireland as a Duke Ph.D. candidate, won the Murphy Prize for Distinguished Book from the American Conference for Irish Studies. He is also a PMLA and Early American Literature author and book historian. He has recently won fellowships from the U.K. Willison Charitable Trust (2023), Maynooth University Library (Ireland, 2022), and University of Aberdeen Library (Scotland, 2022) for a third monograph project: “The British Secret Service and the Scottish and Irish Book Trades, 1660-1829: An Inquiry into the History of Intelligence.”

​One of Professor Moore’s enhancements to the Editorship of Eighteenth-Century Studies was to do data analysis of women’s contributions to the journal such as finding in 2020 that 72 submissions were from women and 58 from men, with women writing 15 of the 24 articles (60%) printed in the journal that year. Indeed, in 2018 Moore did a study of JSTOR downloads and found, strikingly, that 5 of the 6 top downloaded articles from the journal were by women and that most of them were from the 1996 number of the journal or before, indicating that the pioneering work done by our women authors in the 1980s and 1990s continues to accumulate prestige for the journal. Further, in the introduction to the “Empire” issue (52.1, Fall 2018), he established that postcolonial studies essays were the most downloaded from ProjectMUSE in 2017, contradicting a 2009 PMLA roundtable saying that “postcolonialism is over.” He also found that postcolonialism continues to be a diplomatic language, not just a methodology, to address the interrelated histories of violence, domination, inequality, and injustice associated with imperialism, and that its ethics have consistently been associated with finding peace and social justice in the present. Moore not only increased the number of articles from 3-4 per issue to 7-8 per issue, but also with the help of Book Reviews Editor Jennifer Thorn, raised the number of book reviews from 3-5 to 20 per issue. These accomplishments not only made for more comprehensive issues, but also increasing the royalties bottom-line for ASECS. Accordingly, Professor Sean Moore can read a spreadsheet and has data analysis experiences that will serve him in his capacity as a Board Member and Vice-President.