Olivia Sabee

Candidate statement

Olivia Sabee is Associate Professor and Chair of Dance at Swarthmore College (Swarthmore, PA), where she also serves on the committees on Comparative Literature and Interpretation Theory and contributes courses to French and Francophone Studies. She is the author of Theories of Ballet in the Age of the Encyclopédie (Oxford Studies in the Enlightenment, 2022) and has published essays in journals including Eighteenth-Century Studies, French Studies, Dance Chronicle, and Danza e ricerca. She is a current Mellon New Directions Fellow (2023-2026). She has been a member of ASECS since 2015 and has served on the travel awards committee (2022) and is currently on the advisory board for Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. She previously served as Secretary of the Dance Studies Association (2020-2022) and also sits on advisory boards for Dance Chronicle and AIRDanza Review. She believes ASECS to be an important site for the fostering of both disciplinary and interdisciplinary connections between scholars. She is especially committed to facilitating participation in the organization by scholars working in traditionally underrepresented fields and to continuing to cultivate ASECS as a space of inquiry for scholars working on the global eighteenth century.