C. Second Vice-President

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 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.