Candidates: 2021 ASECS Elections

Standing for: 1. President

    • Rebecca Messbarger
    • Name: Rebecca Messbarger
    • Candidate Statement:
      Rebecca Messbarger is Professor of Italian, Affiliate Professor of History, Art History, Performing Arts, and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and founding Director of Medical Humanities at Washington University, where she also served 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 23rd year. She is author of The Lady Anatomist: The Life and Work of Anna Morandi Manzolini (Chicago, 2010), recently translated into German and Italian and the inspiration for a new film of the same title. She co-edited two volumes, The Contest for Knowledge, with Paula Findlen (Chicago, 2005) and Benedict XIV: Art, Science and Spirituality, with Christopher M.S. 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. A recent Rome Prize recipient, she is currently a fellow at the American Academy in Rome conducting research for a book on the Italian Enlightenment. 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: 2. First Vice-President

    • 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); a co-author of The Sun King at Sea: Maritime Art and Galley Slavery in Louis XIV’s France (Getty Research Institute Publications, 2021) and Meltdown: Picturing the World’s First Bubble Economy (Harvey Miller/Brepols, 2020); and a co-editor of Objects in Motion in the Early Modern World (special issue of Art History, 2015). Dr. Martin is currently working on several projects, among them a restaging of a lost ballet pantomime from 1739 known as the Ballet des Porcelaines. She 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 also making it more diverse in membership and global in scope, and she is interested in brainstorming new kinds of conference formats that could possibly incorporate creative presentations like group tableaux vivants.

Standing for: 3. Second Vice-President

    • Mita Choudhury
    • Name: Mita Choudhury
    • Candidate Statement:
      Mita Choudhury is Professor of English at Purdue University Northwest. Her latest book, Nation-Space in Enlightenment Britain: An Archaeology of Empire (Routledge, 2019), describes the spatial dimension of British identity and proposes a critical vocabulary for studying public and private space through the lens of nation. This monograph builds upon her research over the last twenty-five years on the mixed legacy of Enlightenment globalism, modern systems of mediation, and the imperial imaginary in literary production. She is author of Interculturalism and Resistance in the London Theatre, 1660-1800: Performance, Identity, Empire and co-editor (with Laura Rosenthal) of Monstrous Dreams of Reason: Body, Self, and Other in the Enlightenment. Currently she serves as the co-chair of the ASECS Theater and Performance Studies Caucus. As guest editor of the South Atlantic Review (Spring 2001), she opined about the paradox of “Being Global” and described such expressions of xenophobia as seen in neo-Nazi resurgence in Europe. Indeed, the Fourth Industrial Revolution echoes many features of its First predecessor. The devaluation of the humanities, however, is plus ça change only in the absence of resistance to reactionary forces. The challenges of 2020 have made it abundantly clear that institutions must revamp curriculum and retool its resources both human and technological—and, in this endeavor, the role of eighteenth-century studies as sole authority on “foundations” remains critical. Based upon this premise of urgent relevance and using the lens of the Anthropocene, Choudhury argues in a forthcoming article (to be published in 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era) that art, architecture, and cultural productions of the Enlightenment reveal progress but also embed the systemic flaws which still divide and destabilize. Space and location, trade and empire, migrancy and globalization provide the backdrop for Mita Choudhury’s work on the cultural productions of the British Enlightenment.
    • Lisa Freeman
    • Name: Lisa Freeman
    • Candidate Statement:
      Lisa A. Freeman is Professor and Head of the English Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of Character's Theater: Genre and Identity on the Eighteenth-Century English Stage (UPenn, 2002), and Antitheatricality and the Body Public (UPenn, 2017), which was named the Runner-Up for the Association of Theatre in Higher Education Outstanding Book Award, a Finalist for the Theatre Library Association George Freedley Award, and an Honorable Mention for the Joe A. Callaway Prize. She is also the editor of the Sarah Siddons volume for Pickering and Chatto's Lives of Shakespearean Actors series and has published articles, essays, and reviews in publications including ECF, ECTI, SEL, TLS, Theatre Survey and Theatre Journal. She has held fellowships from the Huntington Library, the Newberry Library, and Chawton House Library and is a co-founder and organizer of both the Newberry Library Eighteenth-Century Seminar and the R/18 Collective. She has served ASECS in a variety of capacities, including co-chair Executive Director Search (2020-2021), Women's Caucus Trustee (2018-2022), Executive Board Member-at-Large (2015-2018), co-chair Women's Caucus (2013-2015), and co-chair Masquerade Ball Committee (2013-2014, 2017-2018). She is committed to strengthening and promoting ASECS as a vibrant and vital intellectual and scholarly organization for a diverse community of dix-huitièmistes across all fields. She believes it is especially crucial for the future of ASECS that it find ways to support and be more inclusive of members who are contingent or non-tenure track faculty, work in public humanities positions, or work outside the academy altogether.

Standing for: 4. At-Large Seat #1

    • Tili Boon Cuillé
    • Name: Tili Boon Cuillé
    • Candidate Statement:
      Tili Boon Cuillé is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis, where she co-convenes the Eighteenth-Century Interdisciplinary Salon with Rebecca Messbarger. She is a specialist of eighteenth-century French literature, philosophy, and aesthetics with a particular interest in the visual and performing arts. Her book Divining Nature: Aesthetics of Enchantment in Enlightenment France, made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor, has just been published by Stanford University Press. She is also the author of Narrative Interludes: Musical Tableaux in Eighteenth-Century French Texts (Toronto, 2006) and co-editor with Karyna Szmurlo of Staël’s Philosophy of the Passions: Sensibility, Society, and the Sister Arts (Bucknell, 2013). Her articles on natural history, opera, painting, and the novel have appeared in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and Opera Quarterly, among others. She has served on the MLA Division Executive Committee for Eighteenth-Century French Literature and on the Editorial Board of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. Her current research is on magical objects, material culture, and book illustration in French libertine fiction.
    • Ourida Mostefai
    • Name: Ourida Mostefai
    • Candidate Statement:
      Ourida Mostefai is Professor of Comparative Literature and French Studies at Brown University. She is the author of Le Citoyen de Genève et la République des Lettres (2003) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau écrivain polémique (2016). She has edited Lectures de “la Nouvelle Héloïse” (1993) and co-edited Approaches to Teaching Rousseau’s “Confessions” and “Rêveries” with John C. O’Neal (2003); Rousseau and l’Infâme: Religion, Toleration, and Fanaticism in the Age of Enlightenment with John T. Scott (2009); and Silence, the Implicit and the Unspoken in Rousseau with Brigitte Weltman-Aron and Peter Westmoreland (2020). Her recent work includes a contribution to the MLA Volume on Teaching Representations of the French Revolution, which is part of a larger project on the literature of emigration in the age of Revolutions. She has recently served as the President of the Rousseau Association (2015-2019) and is preparing a critical edition of Rousseau’s Lettre à d’Alembert in collaboration with Rudy Le Menthéour. For ASECS, she was the co-Chair with Larry Wolff of the annual meeting of the Society in Boston (2004) and has served on a number of committees, including as Chair of the Clifford Prize Committee and as Associate Editor and Editor of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture (1998-2002). She currently serves as a member of the editorial board of Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Standing for: 5. At-Large Seat #2

    • Dipti Khera
    • Name: Dipti Khera
    • Candidate Statement:
      Dipti Khera is Associate Professor in Art History and Institute of Fine Arts at NYU. As a scholar of early modern South Asia, with interdisciplinary training in art history, museum anthropology, and architecture, her research and teaching integrate longue durée perspectives and Indian Ocean and Eurasian geographies. Khera's The Place of Many Moods: Udaipur's Painted Lands and India's Eighteenth Century (Princeton, 2020, awarded American Institute of Indian Studies' Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize) reveals powerfully immersive conceptions of a place's moods. Painted by artists from Udaipur, these memorialized moods confront the ways colonial histories have recounted Oriental decadence—raising broader questions about how ecologies, emotions, and artifacts operate in constituting history and subjectivity, politics and place. Her articles have addressed Indian silversmiths' crafting of British taste; material histories of eighteenth-century pleasures; entangled mobilities and conceptual affinities between maps and scrolls that enabled long journeys. Her collaborations with Rajasthan's museums have led to conservation and digital projects, including co-curating an exhibition with Debra Diamond, A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur (Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art, November 2022–May 2023). With Sarah Betzer, she will co-chair the ASECS-sponsored panel (CAA 2021), "The 'Long' Eighteenth-Century?," which will be published in Journal18.
    • Romita Ray
    • Name: Romita Ray
    • Candidate Statement:
      Romita Ray is associate professor of art history at Syracuse University where, starting in Fall 2022, she will direct the university’s South Asia Center. She works on the art and architecture of the British Empire in India. The author of Under the Banyan Tree: Relocating the Picturesque in British India (Yale University Press, 2013), Ray has also published on subjects as varied as the eighteenth-century collections of Elihu Yale and botanical images of tea in eighteenth-century Britain. She is currently working on a book on the visual cultures of tea in India whose histories first evolved in eighteenth-century Calcutta and London. Provisionally titled, Leafy Wonders: Art, Aesthetics, and the Science of Tea in India, it examines the making of “Indian” tea through the trajectories of botanical history, animal studies, portraiture, architecture, and landscape studies. Her research in India, the UK, and the USA has been supported by fellowships from the NEH, the Huntington Library, the Caird Library, Yale Center for British Art, and the Lewis Walpole Library. Ray served on the planning committee of the 2014 NEASECS conference held at Syracuse University. She curated the India section of Between Worlds, Voyagers to Britain, 1700-1850 at the National Portrait Gallery in London.