D. At-Large Seat #1

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 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.