C. 2nd Vice President

I am a Professor of Spanish and Black Studies at Washington College, where I teach Spanish and early modern literature. I specialize in 18th-century pornographic literature in Europe and the Americas, and my 2022 monograph entitled Offensive to Pious Ears, just won the 2023 Prize to the Best Monograph given by the Spanish Society of 18th-Century Studies and the 2023 Prize for the Best Monograph given by the Association for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. I am the exiting president of IASECS or the Ibero American Society of 18th Century Studies, and the current LASA (Latin American Studies Association) Mexico Section co-chair. In 2023 I became the recipient of a Fulbright Global Scholar Award to collaborate with the universities of Bonn in Germany, Oviedo in Spain, and UNAM in Mexico.
As a Mexican-American female professor at a small liberal arts college, my commitment lies with the empowerment of women, immigrants, and Afro-descendants. As for women, I recently co-edited a volume on women and capital reuniting women scholars from various institutions, nations, and fields on the topic of analyzing the role of women in acquiring and administrating capital. As for Latin American scholars, I manage the LASA Mexico Section, and as the Latinx Students advisor, I actively seek to cultivate a strong presence of Spanish speaking and Hispanic heritage students in the higher-ed system. With regards to the Black experience, as the Black Studies program director, I have worked in my college and outside to advance the most pressing issues of our African American students and of the Black Studies field with online seminars and lecturerships.
Having been a representative in other professional associations, I envision my role as one that advocates for issues that do not seem necessarily self evident, like the need for organizational policies and funding to alleviate the extra pressures women have on the profession (daycare issues for conferences, mentoring), the need to take a clear stand against the precarization of our profession by envisaging alternative career paths through mentoring and coaching; the need to bring to the table as decision makers a new and more diverse cohort of leaders who bring innovative ideas to our association, but more importantly, in a moment with high degrees of radicalization, eskepticism, and social fracture, the need to empower 18th academics to reclaim the public sphere by purposefully becoming public scholars who, with their expertise, can impact the larger mediatic society, be it through outreach, civic engagement. or media interventions. I hope that my ideas contribute to our association.

Chunjie Zhang is Associate Professor of German at the University of California, Davis, where she is also affiliated faculty in East Asian Studies, Religious Studies, Comparative Literature, Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, and the Global Migration Center. Zhang is the author of Transculturality and German Discourse in the Age of European Colonialism(Northwestern UP, 2017). She edited or co-edited journal issues on Aesthetics and Politics in the Wake of the Enlightenment (The Germanic Review), Goethe, Worlds, and Literatures (Seminar), and Asian German Studies (German Quarterly). Zhang also edited or co-edited books on global modernism, gender and German colonialism, and globalism. Her articles appeared in venues such as The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Critical Inquiry, Journal of the History of Ideas among others. Zhang is recipient of fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Volkswagen Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the NEH. Her scholarship in the eighteenth century reached beyond the academe: she was invited to give a lecture at the German Historical Museum on Herder and colonialism and write on Kant and the Pacific in a popular journal in Australia. She is the founder of the book series Asia, Europe, and Global Connections with Routledge and is a director-at-large of the Goethe Society North America.

Zhang has served ASECS as a past member of the Aravamudan Article Prize committee (2019), chair (2021) and member (2020) of the Program Committee. She is currently serving as ASECS’s delegate (2022-2026) in the Executive Committee of the International Society for Eighteenth Century Studies, a member in the Bylaws and Constitution Committee (2022), and a member of the advisory board of Eighteenth-Century Studies. For the German Studies Association, Zhang chaired the Book Prize Committee for Literature and Cultural Studies and served a member in the Committee of Institutional Transformation and Social Justice.

Zhang is committed to greater diversity, equity, and inclusion in ASECS’s membership and leadership; to supporting non-tenure-track scholars and graduate student body through networking or social events at annual meetings; and to further strengthening the global perspective in eighteenth-century studies through scholarly, pedagogical, and public-facing projects and events.