Candidates: 2023 ASECS Elections

Standing for: A. President

    • Lisa A. Freeman
    • Name: Lisa A. Freeman
    • Candidate Statement:
      Lisa A. Freeman is Interim Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Professor English 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 First Vice-President (2022-2023), 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 both to foster research, teaching and interest in the field, and 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: B. First 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 new book, In the Land of Marvels. Science, Fabricated Realities, and Industrial Espionage in the Age of the Grand Tour will be published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2023. The book takes the Italian journey of the French physicist abbé Nollet in 1749 to explore the relationship between the manipulation of information and the making of scientific careers. 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 the co-curator of Crafting Worldviews. Art and Science in Europe, 1500-1800 (Yale University Art Gallery, February 17-June 25, 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.

Standing for: C. Second Vice President

    • Misty Anderson
    • Name: Misty Anderson
    • Candidate Statement:
      Misty G. Anderson is the James R. Cox Professor and Head of English at the University of Tennessee, where she also holds courtesy appointments in the Theatre and Religious Studies departments. Anderson is the author of Imagining Methodism in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Enthusiasm, Belief, and the Borders of the Self (Johns Hopkins, 2012) and Female Playwrights and Eighteenth-Century Comedy: Negotiating Marriage on the London Stage (Palgrave, 2002), and is co-editor of the Routledge Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama and Theatre, vols. 1 and 2 (2017 and 2019), with Daniel O’Quinn and Kristina Straub. She has held fellowships at the Beinecke Library, the Lewis Walpole Library, and the Newberry Library. She edited Restoration for 13 years and has published in or reviewed for numerous journals, including ECS, ECF, ECTI, SECC, ECL, RECTR, and Modern Philology. She is one of the founders of the R/18 Collective, a dramaturg for the Clarence Brown and Red Bull Theatres, and a producer of a number of staged readings of Restoration and eighteenth-century plays. She has served ASECS as a past Board member (2016-20), member of the Executive Director search (2020-21), chair of the Women’s Caucus (2015-17), co-chair of the Masquerade Ball Committee (2013-14 and 2017-18), and co-chair of the first Women’s Caucus fundraising committee (2002), as well as in posts as chair of the MLA Restoration and 18thC, later 18thC, and Religion Literature Executive Committees and on the SEASECS board. She believes that ASECS’s future depends on recommitting to our diversity as a community of interdisciplinary scholars; to fostering new work on the global eighteenth-century; to supporting our non-tenure-track colleagues in better and new ways, and to connecting to larger public audiences and artists to communicate the value of our work.
    • Sean Moore
    • Name: Sean Moore
    • Candidate Statement:
      Sean D. Moore is Professor of English and Former Dean of the University of New Hampshire (UNH) Honors College. His ASECS service includes being Editor of Eighteenth-Century Studies (2017-2021), Member of the Travelling Jam Pot Committee (2014-2015), Chair of the Irish Studies Caucus (2006-2012), and his membership in the Race and Empire Caucus. He is most recently author of Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries: British Literature, Political Thought, and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1731-1814 (Oxford UP, 2019), which was funded by NEH, AAS/NEH, Newport Mansions, MHS, and Library Company of Philadelphia fellowships. His first book, Swift, the Book, and the Irish Financial Revolution: Satire and Sovereignty in Colonial Ireland (Johns Hopkins UP, 2010), which was funded by a Fulbright Scholarship to Ireland as a Duke Ph.D. candidate, won the Murphy Prize for Distinguished Book from the American Conference for Irish Studies. He is also a PMLA and Early American Literature author and book historian. He has recently won fellowships from the U.K. Willison Charitable Trust (2023), Maynooth University Library (Ireland, 2022), and University of Aberdeen Library (Scotland, 2022) for a third monograph project: “The British Secret Service and the Scottish and Irish Book Trades, 1660-1829: An Inquiry into the History of Intelligence.” ​One of Professor Moore’s enhancements to the Editorship of Eighteenth-Century Studies was to do data analysis of women’s contributions to the journal such as finding in 2020 that 72 submissions were from women and 58 from men, with women writing 15 of the 24 articles (60%) printed in the journal that year. Indeed, in 2018 Moore did a study of JSTOR downloads and found, strikingly, that 5 of the 6 top downloaded articles from the journal were by women and that most of them were from the 1996 number of the journal or before, indicating that the pioneering work done by our women authors in the 1980s and 1990s continues to accumulate prestige for the journal. Further, in the introduction to the “Empire” issue (52.1, Fall 2018), he established that postcolonial studies essays were the most downloaded from ProjectMUSE in 2017, contradicting a 2009 PMLA roundtable saying that “postcolonialism is over.” He also found that postcolonialism continues to be a diplomatic language, not just a methodology, to address the interrelated histories of violence, domination, inequality, and injustice associated with imperialism, and that its ethics have consistently been associated with finding peace and social justice in the present. Moore not only increased the number of articles from 3-4 per issue to 7-8 per issue, but also with the help of Book Reviews Editor Jennifer Thorn, raised the number of book reviews from 3-5 to 20 per issue. These accomplishments not only made for more comprehensive issues, but also increasing the royalties bottom-line for ASECS. Accordingly, Professor Sean Moore can read a spreadsheet and has data analysis experiences that will serve him in his capacity as a Board Member and Vice-President.

Standing for: D. At-Large Seat #1

    • Barbara Abrams
    • Name: Barbara Abrams
    • Candidate Statement:
      Professor Barbara Abrams is Professor of French and Women’s and Gender Studies at Suffolk University. She is the Director of the Global and Cultural Studies Major Program. Her teaching and scholarship focus on Global and Cultural Studies, French literature of the Enlightenment and Women’s and Gender Studies. One example of her commitment to the field is a course she developed as a first-year seminar titled “Enlightened Insanity.” This class was showcased by the Boston Globe and has encouraged several students to continue their intellectual pursuit in French, History, and 18th Century Studies. Her most recent scholarly work includes an archival research project titled ReSisters : Forensic Storytelling and Antimonarchical Epistolarity in Eighteenth-Century France which examines the letters of women confined against their will. Her recently publications include: Causes Célèbres, Factum ou Fiction, Tanastès : The Audacity of Marie Madeleine de Bonafon and a multi-graph book titled Reframing Rousseau’s Le Lévite d’Ephraïm: The Hebrew Bible, Hospitality, and Modern Identity. Her book, Le Bizarre and Le Décousu in the Novels and Theoretical Works of Denis Diderot: How the Idea of Marginality Originated in Eighteenth-Century France, examines the background of the modern concept of marginality by focusing on Diderot’s materialist philosophy. Professor Abrams is a senior mentor to junior faculty at Suffolk University and is a mentor and advisor in the McNair Fellowship program that focuses on enriching the education of students from diverse backgrounds. She is a member of the Black Studies Advisory Committee. She is the academic liaison for the Suffolk/CAVILAM intensive French program in Vichy, France, and the student exchange program at the Catholic University of Lille, the CCFS program at La Sorbonne, Paris, and a partnership with the American University of Paris. Professor Abrams is former president of the Society for Eighteenth-Century French Studies (SECFS), a member of the Women’s Caucus and has been an active member of ASECS for over thirty years. She has held fellowships at Harvard University, the Newberry Library, and the University of Chicago. She believes that linking scholarship, teaching, and mentorship in essential in shaping the future of ASECS. Professor Abrams is committed to interdisciplinarity and to encouraging colleagues and students in the exploration of global cultures in the eighteenth-century.
    • Julia Abramson
    • Name: Julia Abramson
    • Candidate Statement:
      Julia Luisa Abramson is the Faculty Fellow for the Humanities and Arts in the Office of the Vice President for Research and Partnerships and an Associate Professor of French in the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics at the University of Oklahoma. Abramson’s publications address transdisciplinary topics having historical and contemporary interest. She is the author of Learning from Lying: Paradoxes of the Literary Mystification (U Delaware P, 2005) and “Hoax, Fraud, Plagiarism, Forgery” (Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, forthcoming 2023). Accompanying Food Culture in France (Greenwood P, 2007), her articles about food culture and practice have appeared in EMF: Studies in Early Modern France, JEMCS: the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Sociologie et Sociétés, and Papilles : Culture & patrimoine gourmands. Her publications on financial culture feature in Finance and Society, Common-place: The Journal of Early American Life, and the edited volume L’Argent du libertinage (L’Harmattan, 2021). Abramson has been affiliated with ASECS for more than 25 years and has served on the Modern Languages Association (MLA) executive committee for the Division on Eighteenth-Century French Studies. Her research grants have supported archival and rare books research and public humanities projects engaging general audiences and academic participants. She is committed to promoting visionary and flexible institutional adaptation, along with inclusive and ethical practices.

Standing for: E. At-Large Seat #2

    • Karen Stolley
    • Name: Karen Stolley
    • Candidate Statement:
      Karen Stolley is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Emory University (Atlanta, GA). Publications include DOMESTICATING EMPIRE: Enlightenment in Spanish America (2013) and essays on eighteenth-century studies in The Routledge Companion to the Hispanic Enlightenment (2020), Health and Healing in the Early Modern Iberian World: A Gendered Perspective (2021), and Mexican Literature as World Literature (2022). She co-edited with Mariselle Mélendez a 2015 issue of Colonial Latin America Review devoted to “Enlightenments in Ibero-America.” She serves on the editorial boards of Dieciocho and Oxford Studies in the Enlightenment. She is currently co-editing with Catherine M. Jaffe a collection of essays on “The Black Legend in the Eighteenth Century: National Identities under Construction” (forthcoming in 2024 with Oxford Studies in the Enlightenment). She has been a member of ASECS and the Ibero-American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies for over three decades and has previously served on the Executive Committee (2009-2012) and the Gottshalk Prize Committee (2013, 2022). She is committed to the full participation in our organization of all scholars and teachers working on the global eighteenth century.
    • Downing Thomas
    • Name: Downing Thomas
    • Candidate Statement:
      Downing A. Thomas is Professor of French at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime: 1647-1785 (CambridgeUP, 2002) and Music and the Origins of Language: Theories from the French Enlightenment (CambridgeUP, 1995). He is also co-editor (with Roberta Montemorra Marvin) of Operatic Migrations: Transforming Works and Crossing Boundaries in Musical Drama (Ashgate, 2006) and has published in ECS, SECC, SVEC, Representations, L’Esprit Créateur, and Common Knowledge, among others. He has received grants and fellowships from NEH (Summer Stipend), ACLS (travel grant), McMaster University/ASECS, the Department of State, and the FACE Foundation. He has also been elected President of ADFL (2007) and named Chevalier (Knight) in the Order of Academic Palms by the French Government and Honorary Professor (Hebei Normal Univ., China). Previous service to ASECS include President, MWSECS (2001), Editor and Assoc. Editor, SECC (2006-09), and Nominating Committee, ASECS (2002-03). Other board and administrative experience include serving as associate provost and dean of International Programs (Iowa, 2008-19); chair of the Department of French & Italian (1999-2002; 2003-07); member, Board of Directors, Pyxera Global (2012-2019); and US Advisory Board member, UniQuest (2021-). He is a lifetime member of ASECS, committed to supporting its role as an inspiring home for a diverse community of scholars and teachers.