Candidates: 2022 ASECS Election

Standing for: A. President

    • Wendy Wassyng Roworth
    • Name: Wendy Wassyng Roworth
    • Candidate Statement:
      Wendy Wassyng Roworth is Professor Emerita of Art History at the University of Rhode Island. Her publications on Italian and British art, notably the art and life of Angelica Kauffman, include Angelica Kauffman: A Continental Artist in Georgian England (1992) and as co-editor Italy’s Eighteenth-Century: Gender and Culture in the Age of the Grand Tour (2009). Roworth’s articles and reviews have appeared in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Art Bulletin, Getty Research Journal, Burlington Magazine, Woman’s Art Journal and elsewhere. She served on the ASECS Executive Board and other society committees, the editorial board of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, advisory board of Eighteenth-Century Studies, and currently on the editorial board of Eighteenth-Century Life. She was a founder member of HECAA (Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture) and the Historians of British Art. Throughout her career Roworth has advocated for faculty and other academics, graduate students, and the humanities through leadership roles in the AAUP (American Association of University Professors), including as Vice-President, as Department Chair of Art and Art History, and as president of the URI faculty union.

Standing for: B. First Vice-President

    • Lisa A. Freeman
    • Name: Lisa A. 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 Second Vice-President (2021-2022), 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: C. Second Vice-President

    • Paola Bertucci
    • Name: Paola Bertucci
    • Candidate Statement:
      Paola Bertucci is Associate Professor in the Department of History and in the History of Science and Medicine Program at Yale University. She has a secondary appointment in History of Medicine at the School of Medicine and serves as the Curator of the History of Science and Technology Division of the Peabody Museum of Natural History. Her research focuses on marginalized figures and practices in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly in the context of scientific and artisanal knowledge. She is the author of Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France (Yale University Press, 2017), which looks at the Enlightenment from the perspective of learned artisans and argues for the centrality of the mechanical arts in French colonial and commercial projects. Artisanal Enlightenment was awarded the 2019 Louis Gottschalk from ASECS. Her first book, A Journey in the Land of Marvels: Science and Curiosity in 18th-century Italy, was published in Italian in 2007 (an English version is in preparation). She is the recipient of the 2015 Clifford prize and the 2016 Margaret Rossiter prize from the History of Science Society. She served in the editorial board of Eighteenth-Century Studies and in the Clifford and Gottschalk committees. Paola has a strong interest in bringing innovative scholarly perspectives to broader audiences in museum exhibitions. She designed two permanent galleries in the Galileo Museum in Florence (The Spectacle of Science and Science at Home). At Yale, she is working on the first History of Science and Technology Gallery (that will open in the Peabody Museum in 2024) and is co-curating Crafting Worldviews, an exhibition on early modern science and European colonialism at the Yale University Art Gallery (to open in 2023). She earned her DPhil at Oxford and, before her appointment at Yale, she carried out postdoctoral work in Bologna, Florence, Paris, Stanford, and Berkeley. Her international experiences, together with her curatorial activities, have made her particularly appreciative of scholarship and initiatives that cross disciplinary or intellectual boundaries. Her own research, which mostly focuses on Europe, takes inspiration from studies of cross-cultural encounters and indigenous knowledge outside of Europe. She hopes to bring this multicultural approach to ASECS, promoting initiatives aimed at expanding and diversifying membership and outreach. She believes that, as a time of foundational transformations at a global scale, the eighteenth century offers precious opportunities to better understand the roots of systemic injustice and of critical thinking. She is committed to listening and working with members on strategies for making ASECS a space for effecting positive change, within and beyond academia. She is eager for ASECS to have a stronger media and social media presence, to establish collaborations with other societies or entities on common objectives/themes/events, to develop more inclusive practices to encourage participation and to support members’ creative experimentation.
    • Gregory S. Brown
    • Name: Gregory S. Brown
    • Candidate Statement:
      Gregory S. Brown is Professor in the Department of History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he has taught since 1998. He is also, since 2015, Senior Research Fellow at the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford. He has previously taught at Hunter College (CUNY), and George Mason University (Center for History and New Media) and been a visiting lecturer at Columbia University, the University of Minnesota and the Ecole normale supérieure (Ulm). I am an historian, trained in the French Enlightenment and Revolution, informed by interests in intellectual and literary history, sociology of culture, and historical methodology. Since 1995, I have taught in these areas at three different, urban public universities which serve a high proportion of first-generation students and now hold Minority Serving Institution status. In the past 10 years, my research and teaching have broadened onto the eighteenth century and modern period in the global context. I have been an ASECS member since 1993 – as a graduate student, as a contingent faculty member and since 1999 as a tenure-track faculty member. In that time, I have attended, nearly annually, our national conferences and different regional conferences. I have been co-chair of the local arrangements committee for the national ASECS (2005) and of the program committee for a regional WSECS (2018). I was also a founding member in 1999 of the Society for Eighteenth-Century French Studies which has become the second largest caucus of ASECS, and in 2005, I organized the first of what is now an annual dinner of the SECFS members. I have proposed and organized many conference sessions, most recently a roundtable on "Peer Review Practices of DH projects in the 18th century" (2001). Since 2017, I have been an affiliate representative to ASECS of the Voltaire Foundation, and in the fall of 2020, working with the then-president Jeff Ravel and Liverpool University Press, I helped facilitate temporary access for all ASECS members to the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment Online archive. Beyond ASECS, I have been active in eighteenth-century studies, most notably since 2015 as general editor of the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment book series (formerly known as SVEC). In this role, I have worked closely with a wide range of ASECS (and ISECS) members from a diverse range of disciplines, career stages and geographical and institutional homes. From 2016 through 2019, I was a participant (and in 2018, co-convenor) of the Digitizing Enlightenment summer workshops on eighteenth-century digital humanities scholarship. In my current research, I am pursuing three projects, on 1.) the material culture, landscape and domestic architecture of genteel urban housing in the context of late eighteenth-century French political history; 2.) the correspondence network of the playwright and diplomatic / court figure Pierre Augustin-Caron de Beaumarchais; and 3.) the intellectual and institutional emergence of the field of eighteenth-century studies in the anglophone world in the mid 20th century (up to and including the origins of the ISECS and ASECS). My scholarly work has been recognized with the Clifford Prize (2001) for an ECS article on the self-fashioning of Olympe de Gouges as an abolitionist and feminist; an AHA Gutenberg-e Award for my first book (Columbia UP, 2002) on the status of writers in court and public culture from Racine to the Revolution’ and more recently, as the ASECS/BSECS keynote lecturer at the 2021 BSECS conference. Finally I have served on multiple nonprofit boards, including 3 terms as an officer of the Nevada Faculty Alliance (my state’s AAUP conference). I served as well as Faculty Senate chair and as Vice Provost for Faculty and Research Policy, giving me direct experience with budgeting; with academic personnel issues; and with strategic planning. I accepted the nomination to the executive board in good part from a longstanding concern to bring into our leadership representation from regional and comprehensive public institutions, which I believe represent an important part of the current and future membership of ASECS.

Standing for: D. Member-at-Large Seat #1

    • Alison Conway
    • Name: Alison Conway
    • Candidate Statement:
      Alison Conway is Professor of English, and Gender and Women’s Studies, at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. She is the author Private Interests: Women, Portraiture, and the Visual Culture of the English Novel, 1709-1791 (2001) and The Protestant Whore: Courtesan Narrative and Religious Controversy in England, 1680-1750 (2010). She is also co-editor, with Mary Helen McMurran, of Mind, Body, Motion, Matter: Eighteenth-Century British and French Literary Perspectives (2016), and co-editor, with David Alvarez, of Imagining Religious Toleration: a Literary History of an Idea, 1600-1830 (2019). Her most recent monograph, Sacred Engagements: Interfaith Marriage, Religious Toleration, and the British Novel, 1750-1820, is forthcoming with the Johns Hopkins University Press. She has been active in the ASECS Women’s Caucus since 1995 and is currently serving as Chair of the ASECS Travel Grants committee. She was President of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies from November 2017 through June 2021 and is currently serving as interim Co-Editor of Eighteenth-Century Fiction, with Corrinne Harol.
    • Emily C. Friedman
    • Name: Emily C. Friedman
    • Candidate Statement:
      Emily C. Friedman is Associate Professor of English at Auburn University and Director of 18thConnect.org, a peer-reviewing body and aggregator of digital humanities projects in eighteenth-century studies. A scholar whose work brings together book history, digital humanities, narratology, and fan studies, she is the author of Reading Smell in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Bucknell 2016), co-edited (with Devoney Looser) a special issue of Romantic Circles Pedagogy on Teaching Austen, and is the Project Lead on Manuscript Fiction in the Age of Print, 1750-1900, a database of never-published fiction. With Emily Kugler she is the co-founder of Playing the Eighteenth-Century, a public scholarship project trading depictions of eighteenth-century culture in modern games. Her work has appeared in Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Women’s Writing, Keats-Shelley Journal, Burney Journal, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, among other venues. An ASECS member since 2005, she has served as Co-Chair of the Graduate Caucus and the Digital Humanities Caucus, Conference President for a combined meeting of the Aphra Behn Society and Frances Burney Society, President/Founder of the International Samuel Richardson Society, and Member at Large to SE-ASECS. She will soon join the boards of Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment and Electronic Enlightenment.

Standing for: E. Member-at-Large Seat #2

    • Barbara Naddeo
    • Name: Barbara Naddeo
    • Candidate Statement:
      Barbara Naddeo is an Associate Professor of History at The City College and Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she teaches European history, 1400-1800. A historian of eighteenth-century Italy with wide-ranging interests, she has published interdisciplinary work on a wide variety of topics, including opera buffa, the Grand Tour, cartography and geography, medical anthropology and “southern” ideas about developmental inequalities. That work has appeared in international peer-reviewed journals, such as Eighteenth-Century Studies, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, Imago Mundi, Modern Intellectual History, and specialty Italian journals. Naddeo is also author of the award-winning monograph on Giambattista Vico, Vico and Naples: The Urban Origins of Modern Social Theory (Cornell University Press; winner, Barzun Prize), which has showed that Vico’s new science was, in its first instance, a polemic against the inequalities of metropolitan society and a manifesto on the rights of its disenfranchised, which controversially prescribed natural jurisprudence and the norms of equity as the practical means of their redress over time. Her current book project examines the transformation of the state wrought by the information revolution, on which she has undertaken extensive research in southern Italian archives. For her case study, she has chosen the famous Italian statistician Giuseppe Maria Galanti (1743—1806), whose magnum opus, an encyclopedic political geography of the Kingdom of Naples was, in its time, unprecedented for its extensive publication of social numbers and archival vision of the modern state. This project has been supported by the awards of numerous institutions: such as, the Rome Prize in Early Modern Studies, a Humanities Fellowship at the Italian Academy for Advanced Study in America at Columbia, as well as a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society. Naddeo has served extensively at CUNY, where she sits on the Executive Committees of both her home department at The City College and the Ph.D. Program in History at the Graduate Center, both of which she has helped to administer in myriad ways. She has also served ASECS as a member of the Clifford Prize Committee and would be honored to serve on its Executive Board. She has been an active member of a number of other professional associations, including the Renaissance Society of America and the History of Science Society, and has throughout her career pursued productive forms of interdisciplinary collaboration with scholars working on early modern Europe and its colonial world.
    • Meghan Roberts
    • Name: Meghan Roberts
    • Candidate Statement:
      Meghan Roberts is Associate Professor of History at Bowdoin College, where she teaches early modern European history. She is the author of Sentimental Savants: Philosophical Families in Enlightenment France (University of Chicago Press, 2016). Her articles on families, gender, science, and medicine in the eighteenth century have appeared in French Historical Studies, The Journal of Women's History, Eighteenth-Century Studies, The Journal of Modern History, and the online journals Age of Revolutions and Notches. Her current research considers how eighteenth-century French medical practitioners established and exercised their authority during an age of media revolution and colonial exploitation.