E. Member-at-Large 2

Brian Cowan is Associate Professor of History at McGill University in Montréal, Canada. His publications include The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse, (Yale, 2005); The State Trial of Doctor Henry Sacheverell, (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012); and as a member of the Multigraph Collective, Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in an Era of Print Saturation, (Chicago, 2018). He has edited The Cultural History of Fame in the Age of Enlightenment, (Bloomsbury, forthcoming) and, with Scott Sowerby, The State Trials and the Politics of Justice in Later Stuart England, (Boydell, 2021). He is currently President of the Board of Directors for the international Groupement d’Intérêt Scientifique (GIS) devoted to ‘sociability in the long eighteenth century’, which recently launched DIGIT.EN.S, the online encyclopedia of British sociability in the long eighteenth century: https://www.digitens.org/en

He has served as a member of the editorial board for Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture (2008-11) and was co-editor, with Elizabeth Elbourne, of the Journal of British Studies (2010-15). He has been an active member of both ASECS and the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (CSECS) for most of the twenty-first century. He is committed to bringing an international perspective to the study of the global eighteenth century, and to rethinking the role of scholarly societies in a fast-changing environment.

Andrew Graciano is Professor of Art History (and Medical Humanities and Culture) at the University of South Carolina. He is particularly interested in the relationships among art, science, economics, society, and politics in the Age of Enlightenment in Europe and elsewhere. It is for this reason that the scope of his research goes beyond that of traditional art history and incorporates other histories, including especially those of medicine and natural philosophy (science in its broadest sense). The interdisciplinary methodology of Graciano’s research reflects his academic up-bringing, having worked closely with Professor Christopher Johns (Vanderbilt, Art History) and Professor Karen Parshall (U. of Virginia, History and Mathematics).

Specific research interests include: the history of anatomical study in artistic training; the Felix Meritis Maatschappij (Happiness through Merit Society) of Amsterdam; Charles Howard Hodges and Dutch official portraiture in the early 19th century; Africa and the Middle East in European ‘Orientalist’ paintings; and artistic representations of nascent national identity in 19th-century Puerto Rico.

Graciano is currently Vice Chair of the Latino Hispanic Faculty Caucus here at USC, and served (2018-2022) as Chair of the University Faculty Advisory Committee (a Faculty Senate Committee), which liaises between the Provost’s Office and the Faculty on matters of policy. He has been co-leader of the Mid-Career Faculty Development Program (2021-present), which has gone so well that the Provost’s Office wants him and his co-lead partner to take it university-wide in 2024-2025. He has served as Director of Graduate Studies for 13 years (2009-2021, 2023-present) and was Associate Director (Associate Chair) of SVAD for 10 years (2011-2021), and now chair for the to-be-renamed SVAD DEI Committee.

An active ASECS member, he served for two years on the Program Committee (including as Program Committee Chair), and served as a member and then chair of the Jam Pot Committee.