Candidates: 2020 ASECS Elections

Standing for: 1. President ("In accordance with article VII of the ASECS Constitution, the position of President is uncontested.")

    • William Warner
    • Name: William Warner
    • 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 40 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 2013-2016 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 interdisciplinary 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: 2. First Vice President ("In accordance with article VII of the ASECS Constitution, the position of First Vice President is uncontested.")

    • Rebecca Messbarger
    • Name: Rebecca Messbarger
    • 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: 3. Second Vice President

    • Douglas Fordham
    • Name: Douglas Fordham
    • Candidate Statement:
      Douglas Fordham is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Virginia and the Director of Graduate Studies for the PhD Program in Art and Architectural History. He is a co-editor of Art and the British Empire (Manchester UP 2007, winner of the Historians of British Art book prize) and British Art and the Seven Years’ War: Allegiance and Autonomy (UPenn, 2010). His most recent book, Aquatint Worlds: Travel, Print, and Empire was published by Yale University Press this year. The book examines how a tonal, and often hand-colored, print medium shaped the representation of global travel and colonization between 1770 and 1820. Fordham has been a fellow at the Yale Center for British Art, the Folger Library, the Rare Book School, and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. He recently completed a Mellon Fellowship for Indigenous Arts at the University of Virginia where he integrated collections and histories of Australasian indigenous arts into courses on the eighteenth-century and British art. He served on the ASECS Board as a Member-at-Large in 2018-19, and he served on the advisory boards of Literature Compass and Eighteenth-Century Studies. Having benefited in countless ways from the collaborations and friendships that ASECS helped to make possible, Douglas would like to expand the number of young scholars in the Society and encourage the participation of scholars from a wide array of disciplinary and geographic specializations.
    • Meredith Martin
    • Name: Meredith Martin
    • Candidate Statement:
      Meredith Martin is associate professor of art history at NYU and the Institute of Fine Arts. Specializing in French art and architecture from the 17th to 19th Centuries, she is the author of Dairy Queens: The Politics of Pastoral Architecture from Catherine de’ Medici to Marie-Antoinette (Harvard University Press, 2011), and a co-editor of Objects in Motion in the Early Modern World (special issue of Art History, 2015) and Architectural Space in Eighteenth-Century Europe: Constructing Identities and Interiors (Ashgate, 2010). Along with historian Gillian Weiss, Dr. Martin has recently completed a book entitled The Sun King at Sea: Maritime Art and Slavery in Louis XIV’s France, for which they were awarded an ACLS Collaborative Fellowship (2016-2018). She is currently working on several projects, among them an exhibition on the 1720 Mississippi and South Sea bubbles that will open at The New York Public Library in October 2020; a study of diplomatic and artistic relations between France and Thailand (c. 1650-1900); and a history of porcelain rooms from the 17th C. to the present, which includes the restaging of an 18th-C. ballet known as the Ballet des Porcelaines. Dr. Martin is a founding editor of Journal18 (www.journal18.org), an online journal devoted to 18th-C. art and culture from around the globe. She wishes to expand ASECS’s interdisciplinary focus while making it more diverse in membership and more global in scope. She would also like to brainstorm new conference formats and to bring members together by having them perform tableaux vivants at conferences.

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

    • Catherine Jaffe
    • Name: Catherine Jaffe
    • Candidate Statement:
      Catherine Jaffe is Professor of Spanish Literature at Texas State University and currently a Fellow at the Madrid Institute for Advanced Study. Specializing in women writers, gender, and translation, Jaffe co-authored with Elisa Martín-Valdepeñas "María Lorenza de los Ríos, marquesa de Fuerte-Híjar: Vida y obra de una escritora del Siglo de las Luces" (2019), co-edited with Elizabeth Lewis "Eve’s Enlightenment: Women’s Experience in Spain and Spanish America, 1726-1831" (2009), and co-edited with Lewis and Mónica Bolufer "The Routledge Companion to the Hispanic Enlightenment" (2019). Jaffe serves on the Executive Committee of the MLA 18th-19thC Spanish and Iberian Literature Forum. Her research has been supported by Spain’s Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the ASECS Women’s Caucus. For ASECS, Jaffe served as president and Executive Secretary/Treasurer of the Ibero-American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and produced two concerts of Ibero-American music (ASECS 2012, 2014). She served on the editorial board of SECC and currently serves on the boards of Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, Dieciocho: Hispanic Enlightenment, and Anales de Literatura Española (Universidad Alicante). She holds a B.A. in English from Georgetown University and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago.
    • Karin Wurst
    • Name: Karin Wurst
    • Candidate Statement:
      Karin A. Wurst is Professor of German at Michigan State University. Her books have focused on representations of the family, women's drama, and cultural consumption in 18th-Century Germany, as well as on J.M.R. Lenz: Das Schlaraffenland verwilderter Ideen. Narrative Strategien in den Prosaerzählungen von J. M. R. Lenz (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2014); Fabricating Pleasure: Fashion, Entertainment, and Consumption in Germany (1780-1830), German Literary Theory and Cultural Studies (Wayne State University Press, 2005). Karin A. Wurst and Alan Leidner, Unpopular Virtues: J. M. R. Lenz and the Critics. A Reception History (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1999). Edited and introduced Eleonore Thon's "Adelheit von Rastenberg." Texts and Translation Series. (New York: MLA, 1996). Edited and introduced J.M.R. Lenz als Alternative? Positionsanalysen zum 200. Todestag (Köln, Wien, Weimar: Böhlau, 1992). Frau und Drama im achtzehnten Jahrhundert (Köln, Wien: Böhlau, 1991). "Familiale Liebe ist die wahre Gewalt." Zur Repräsentation der Familie in Lessings dramatischem Werk"(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988). Her articles focus on 17th- and 18th-century Germany and issues of gender, cultural and aesthetic representation. They have appeared in German Quarterly, Daphnis, German Studies Review, Lessing Yearbook, Text + Kritik, Seminar, Women in German Yearbook, Goethe Yearbook, Lenz Jahrbuch. Her teaching interests include literary and cultural theories, feminist theory, women's literature and material culture. From 2006 to 2014 she served as Dean of the College of Arts and Letters at MSU; she served as Special Advisor to the Provost on Intercultural Learning and Student Engagement (2014-16).

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

    • Lisa Forman Cody
    • Name: Lisa Forman Cody
    • Candidate Statement:
      Lisa Forman Cody is Associate Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College and author of Birthing the Nation: Sex, Science, and the Conception of Eighteenth-Century Britons (Oxford University Press, 2005), which won three prizes including the Berkshires Conference Best First Book Award. She is currently writing a monograph, “Divided We Stand: Women’s Rights and Personhood in English Marriage, 1660-1860.” Her articles have appeared in several edited volumes and journals, including the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, French Historical Studies, Gender & History, Journal of Women’s History, SECC, and ECS. She won the Western Association of Women Historians Article Prize (2002, 2005) and the North American Conference on British Studies Article Prize (2005). She has served on the American Historical Association’s Nominating Committee and other committees for the AHA, Berkshires, Western Association of Women Historians, Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies, including as Treasurer (2018-2020). She is active in public service and was appointed to the California State Bar’s Judicial Nominees Evaluation Commission (2018-2020). As a member of ASECS, she has served on the Macaulay and Clifford Prizes and the editorial board of SECC, for which she also served as associate editor (vols 39-40) and editor (vols 41-42).
    • April Shelford
    • Name: April Shelford
    • Candidate Statement:
      April G. Shelford holds a Ph.D. in History from Princeton University (1997); she is now Associate Professor of History at American University, Washington, DC. A specialist in the intellectual history of early modern Europe, she won the Selma Forkosch prize for best article published in the Journal of the History of Ideas in 2002. She published Transforming the Republic of Letters: Pierre-Daniel Huet and European Intellectual Life, 1650-1720 with the University of Rochester/Boydell Press in 2007. She is now completing a book manuscript, A Caribbean Enlightenment, which was inspired by a two-year visiting professorship at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica. In connection with this project, she has made numerous conference presentations, published articles in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Atlantic Studies, and History of European Ideas, and contributed a chapter to Before the Public Library: Reading, Community, and Identity in the Atlantic World, 1650-1850. She has served twice on the Governing Council of the Western Society of French History, and she co-edited the association's Proceedings (now Journal) for three years as it transitioned from print to online. She served on the ASECS Travel Awards Committee in 2018