D. Member-at-Large 1

Jason Shaffer is Professor of English (and a former department Chair) at the United State Naval Academy. He is the author of Performing Patriotism: National Identity in the Colonial and Revolutionary American Theatre (University of Pennsylvania, 2007). He has published in, among other venues, Theatre Survey, Early American Literature, Comparative Drama, and Common Place, along with essays or chapters in several edited volumes and reference works. He is affiliated with the Theatre and Performance Studies Caucus (TaPS), and ASECS has been his primary scholarly home since attending his first conference in 2001.

As an interdisciplinary scholar with a strong record of collaborating across fields and someone who has also presented at theater studies, history, and early American studies conferences, he feels strongly that the future of ASECS lies in multidisciplinary outreach and in encouraging the presentation and publication of scholarship on material originating (or circulating) outside the British metropole.

Olivia Sabee is Associate Professor and Chair of Dance at Swarthmore College (Swarthmore, PA), where she also serves on the committees on Comparative Literature and Interpretation Theory and contributes courses to French and Francophone Studies. She is the author of Theories of Ballet in the Age of the Encyclopédie (Oxford Studies in the Enlightenment, 2022) and has published essays in journals including Eighteenth-Century Studies, French Studies, Dance Chronicle, and Danza e ricerca. She is a current Mellon New Directions Fellow (2023-2026). She has been a member of ASECS since 2015 and has served on the travel awards committee (2022) and is currently on the advisory board for Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. She previously served as Secretary of the Dance Studies Association (2020-2022) and also sits on advisory boards for Dance Chronicle and AIRDanza Review. She believes ASECS to be an important site for the fostering of both disciplinary and interdisciplinary connections between scholars. She is especially committed to facilitating participation in the organization by scholars working in traditionally underrepresented fields and to continuing to cultivate ASECS as a space of inquiry for scholars working on the global eighteenth century.