Candidates: ASECS 2019 Elections

Standing for: 1. President ("In accordance with article VII of the ASECS Constitution, the positions of President and First Vice President are uncontested.")

    • Jeffrey Ravel (History, MIT)
    • Name: Jeffrey Ravel (History MIT)
    • Candidate Statement:
      Jeffrey Ravel is Professor and Head of the History Faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of The Contested Parterre: Public Theater and French Political Culture, 1680-1791 (1999), and The Would-Be Commoner: A Tale of Deception, Murder, and Justice in Seventeenth-Century France (2008). He is currently at work on a history of French playing cards from the Old Regime to the early nineteenth century. He was a co-founder of CESAR (cesar.org.uk), a web site that offers its users data, images, texts, and other material relevant to the study of spectacle in France and Francophone regions from 1600 to 1800. At present he is a co-director of the Comédie-Française Registers Project (cfrgeisters.org), another digital initiative that makes available nightly box office records for over 34,000 performances given by the Comédie-Française theater troupe in Paris from 1680 to 1793. A member of ASECS for a quarter of a century, Ravel edited volumes 35 and 36 of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, and served as an at-large member of the ASECS Executive Board from 2011 to 2014. He was the Co-President of the Society for French Historical Studies in 2012-2013, and he has been the convener of the Boston-Area French History Group for half a dozen years.

Standing for: 2. First Vice President ("In accordance with article VII of the ASECS Constitution, the positions of President and First Vice President are uncontested.")

    • William B. Warner (English, U. of California, Santa Barbara)
    • Name: William B. Warner (English U. of California Santa Barbara)
    • Candidate Statement:
      William Warner is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UC/ Santa Barbara. His latest book is Protocols of Liberty: Communication Innovation and the American Revolution (Chicago), which won the Gottschalk Prize in 2013. His monographs include: Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain (1684-1750) (U of California), Chance and the Text of Experience: Freud, Nietzsche, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Cornell); and Reading Clarissa: The Struggles of Interpretation (Yale). He is the co-editor of two collections: This is Enlightenment (ed. with Clifford Siskin, Chicago), and Cultural Institutions of the Novel (ed. with Deirdre Lynch, Duke). He has published over forty essays and book chapters and he has held fellowships from the ACLS and the Clark Library. He has served as Chair of English at UC/ Santa Barbara as well as on the ASECS Executive Board from 2013-16 and the Gottschalk Prize Committee in 2014-2015. He is currently writing upon how the early novel’s claim upon reality changes our understanding of later forms of ‘realism’ in literature, art, history and philosophy. ASECS’s great strengths emerge from its coherent historical focus and its inter-disciplinary scope. In an epoch when the disciplines of the humanities face downsizing, our challenge is to sustain the advancement of knowledge in the ways consistent with ASECS. We can be innovative and relevant in a fashion consistent with the dynamic intellectual legacy of the historical epoch we study.

Standing for: 3. Second Vice-President

    • Ruth Hill (Spanish & Humanities, Vanderbilt University)
    • Name: Ruth Hill (Spanish & Humanities Vanderbilt University)
    • Candidate Statement:
      Ruth Hill (B.A., Northwestern University; M.A. and Ph.D., University of Michigan) is Professor of Spanish and Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. She came to Vanderbilt in 2012 after two years as a tenure-track assistant professor of Spanish at Columbia University, and sixteen years on the faculty of Spanish and American Studies at the University of Virginia. Currently, she teaches courses on the history of early modern science, critical race studies, and Latin American, Latinx, and American literature and culture. She has directed Ph.D. dissertations on Iberia and the Americas, 16th- 21st centuries, covering the fields of Atlantic history and literature, history of religion, history of natural history, critical science studies, critical race studies, literature (novels, short stories, drama, colonial chronicles), legal history, and rhetoric. She is the author of two books: Sceptres and Sciences in the Spains and Hierarchy, Commerce, and Fraud in Bourbon Spanish America, along with numerous special issues, essays, and book chapters. Her current book, Reckoning with Race in the New World, will be published by the University of Virginia Press. It tackles the trans-Atlantic and trans-American origins of human racial categories, finding their scientific roots in animal and plant breeding practices and their religious roots in disputes over mixed-race persons, in moral theology and canon law. Her next book project, Incas, Aztecs, and Other White Men: A Hemispheric History of Hate, is a study of Aryanism in North and South America, 1850-present. A former Fulbright Scholar, Professor Hill has received grants and fellowships from numerous institutions, including the John Carter Brown Library and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has broad experience with government-funded research teams and government grants and fellowships councils in Spain, Germany, Mexico, the U.S., and Canada. I would like to see us continue to support our affiliated societies and our caucuses. Additionally, I am committed to maintaining our nurturing environment for new generations of eighteenth-century teachers and scholars and, at the same time, taking advantage of their experiences with digital humanities and global studies programs. Finally, within the flexible framework of our Society, I would like to leverage my engagements abroad, with university research teams and centers, governmental grants and fellowships agencies, and libraries, to widen our international dialogues and opportunities for graduate students.
    • Rebecca Messbarger, (Romance Languages & Lit., Washington University)
    • Name: Rebecca Messbarger (Romance Languages & Lit. Washington University)
    • Candidate Statement:
      Rebecca Messbarger is Professor of Italian, Affiliate Professor of History, Art History, and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and founding Director of Medical Humanities at Washington University, where she also serves as Associate Director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the Medical School. She founded and co-convenes the Eighteenth-Century Interdisciplinary Salon at Washington University, now in its 22nd year. She is author of The Lady Anatomist: The Life and Work of Anna Morandi Manzolini (Chicago, 2010), recently translated into German and published by Dei Andere Bibliothek, and The Century of Women (Toronto 2002). She co-edited two volumes, The Contest for Knowledge, with Paula Findlen (Chicago, 2005) and Benedict XIV: Art, Science and Spirituality, with Christopher Johns and Phil Gavitt (Toronto, 2016). She is recipient of the Catharine Macaulay, Clifford, and Percy Adams Prizes, and her research has been supported by the NEH, Mellon Foundation, and American Philosophical Society. She has been a member of ASECS for more than 20 years, has served on the editorial board of SECC, the Executive Board as at-large member (2011-14), and various committees. She has prized working with members of the Italian Caucus of ASECS to attract Italian scholars and promote eighteenth-century Italian studies. She is committed to building on the Society’s strengths while invigorating the presence of underrepresented disciplines, attracting a diverse, international membership of scholars at every stage, and promoting multidisciplinary, transmedia approaches to the eighteenth-century.

Standing for: 4. Member-at-Large (3 years) (Seat 1)

    • Tita Chico (English, University of Maryland)
    • Name: 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.
    • Suvir Kaul (English, University of Pennsylvania)
    • Name: Suvir Kaul (English University of Pennsylvania)
    • Candidate Statement:
      Suvir Kaul is A. M. Rosenthal Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He took B.A. (Honours), M.A., and M. Phil. Degrees from the University of Delhi before his Ph.D. from Cornell University (1986). He has taught at the SGTB Khalsa College of the University of Delhi, Cornell University, Stanford University, the Jamia Milia Islamia, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Campaign, where he was also the Director of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities. At Penn he has served as the Director the South Asia Center (2005-07) and as Chair of the English Department (2007-10). In Spring 2016, he was a Visiting Fellow at the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Advanced Study, Jawaharlal Nehru University. He is the author of Of Gardens and Graves: Kashmir, Poetry, Politics (Duke University Press, 2017; New Delhi: Three Essays Collective, 2015); Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009); Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 2000; Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001) which won the Walker Cowen Prize; and of Thomas Gray and Literary Authority: Ideology and Poetics in Eighteenth-Century England (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992). He has edited The Partitions of Memory: the afterlife of the division of India (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001; London: C. Hurst, 2001; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), and co-edited (with Ania Loomba, Antoinette Burton, Matti Bunzl and Jed Esty), Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (Durham, Duke University Press, 2005; New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2005). He teaches and writes on eighteenth-century British literature and culture, South Asian writing in English, and critical theory, including postcolonial studies.

Standing for: 5. Member-at-Large (3 years) (Seat 2)

    • Tara Zanardi (Art History, Hunter College, CUNY)
    • Name: Tara Zanardi (Art History Hunter College CUNY)
    • Candidate Statement:
      Tara Zanardi is Associate Professor of Art History at Hunter College, CUNY, where she teaches courses on eighteenth-century visual and material culture. She is the author of Framing Majismo: Art and Royal Identity in Eighteenth-Century Spain (Pennsylvania State University, 2016; Honorable Mention for the 2017 Eleanor Tufts Book Award from the American Society for Hispanic Art Historical Studies) and co-editor of Visual Typologies from the Early Modern to the Contemporary: Local Contexts and Global Practices (Routledge; June 2018). She has written articles on porcelain interiors, visual representations of and national debates surrounding the bullfight, ruin imagery produced during the Spanish War of Independence (1808-14), and the relationship between gender and fashion. She is currently writing a book, Artful Politics and Bourbon Identity: The Porcelain Room at Aranjuez. The book situates this tour-de-force interior in the context of Charles III’s political strategies and colonial reform, natural history, porcelain collecting and display, and the relationship between identity and interior design. Zanardi has been an active member of ASECS and HECAA since she was a graduate student.
    • Jennifer Germann (Art History, Ithaca College)
    • Name: Jennifer Germann (Art History Ithaca College)
    • Candidate Statement:
      Jennifer Germann is Associate Professor and incoming Chair of Art History at Ithaca College, where she teaches art history and visual culture studies and is a faculty affiliate of the Women’s and Gender Studies program. Her current research investigates the intersections of gender, social rank, and race in relation to the representation of Black and mixed-race women in eighteenth-century Britain. She is the author of Picturing Marie Leszczinska: Representing Queenship in Eighteenth-Century France (Ashgate 2015) and co-editor of Materializing Gender in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Ashgate 2016) with Dr. Heidi Strobel. She has published articles and chapters on Marie Leszczinska, Anne of Austria, and Marie-Éléonore Godefroid, including in SECC. She is co-editor of a forthcoming special issue of ECS with Dr. Michael Yonan. She has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Lurcy Foundation, the NEH, the Yale Center for British Art, and she is a recent Fulbright Scholar at the University of York. She attended her first ASECS conference as a PhD candidate, has been a faithful member since 1999, and served as HECAA Secretary-Treasurer. She has also served on award committees for both HECAA and ASECS and has participated on and chaired sessions at ASECS, ISECS, and NEASECS. She is committed to the future of ASECS as a leading interdisciplinary organization supporting an upcoming generation of scholars and seeks to promote diversity in the membership and in the subjects of study. ASECS has been central to her academic life since 1997 and, if elected, she would welcome the opportunity to serve as Member-at-Large.