Elections: 2026-2027

Feb. 12, 2026 (56 days before the Annual Meeting): Election slate and petition instructions published
Feb. 26, 2026 (14 days after publication of the Election Slate): Deadline for nominations by petition, sent to the Executive Director
March 13, 2026 (28 days before the Annual Business Meeting): Ballot and instructions circulated to members

Board of Director Candidates

ASECS members will elect 3 new Executive Board members: 2nd Vice President, and 2 Members-at-Large for the period July 1, 2024-June 30, 2025. In accordance with our Constitution and Bylaws (see the Governance page), the current 2nd Vice President stands for the 1st Vice President position, and the current 1st Vice President stands for the President position.

Candidates:

President: Elena Deanda-Camacho

1st VP: Amy Freund

2nd Vice President:

Mariselle Meléndez, University of Illinois Champaign
Tili Boon Cuillé, Washington University at St. Louis

Member at Large 1:

Downing Thomas, University of Iowa
Jared Richman, Colorada College

Member at Large 2:

Wendy Bellion, University of Delaware
Yota Batsaki, Dumbarton Oaks

Graduate Student Representative:

Pamela Ahern (elected by the Graduate Student and Early Career Caucus)

Continuing Elected Members

2024-2027: Member-at-Large, Brian Cowan
2024-2027: Member-at-Large, Olivia Sabee
2025-2028: Member-at-Large, Al Coppola
2025-2028: Member-at-Large, Chloe Northtrop

Appointed Members
Benita Blessing, Executive Director
Joseph Bartolomeo, Treasurer
Manushag “Nush” Powell, Parliamentarian

Misty G. Anderson will serve as Past President, ex officio and nonvoting.

Candidates for Executive Board

Members who will continue on the Executive Board and their respective categories are listed below the candidates for election.

President

Elena Deanda-Camacho (Category B: Languages and Literatures other than English and American)

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 was 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. I am currently ASECS 2nd Vice President of ASESC.

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, skepticism, 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.

1st Vice President

Amy Freund (Category C: Music, Visual Arts, and Theater)

Amy Freund is an associate professor and the Kleinheinz Endowment for the Arts and Education Endowed Chair in art history at Southern Methodist University. Her first book, Portraiture and Politics in Revolutionary France (Penn State, 2014), examines the uses of portraiture to reformulate personal and political identity during the French Revolution. Her second book, Noble Beasts: Hunters and Hunted in Eighteenth-Century French Art, which will appear with Yale in 2025, analyzes the representation of masculinity, animality, and political agency in hunting art. Her work has appeared in The Art Bulletin, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Journal18, Art History, and French History, and has been supported by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts and the Clark Art Institute. She has served as vice-president and president of HECAA (Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture), on the editorial board of Oxford Studies in the Enlightenment, and the ASECS graduate student paper prize committee.

She was elected president of HECAA at the dawn of the pandemic, and worked with the officers and board to transform it into a radically more public-facing, inclusive, and equitable intellectual community. Under her leadership, HECAA created research showcases for emerging scholars, a pandemic relief fund, a standing DEI committee, and an ongoing series of online research and mentorship events. Her work at HECAA was rooted in her belief in the values of ASECS: its support of members at all career stages and in all professional roles, and its ongoing work to provide spaces (real and virtual) of intellectual exchange and conviviality for scholars of the eighteenth century across disciplines and geographies,

2nd Vice President Candidates

Mariselle Meléndez (Category C: Music, Visual Arts, and Theater)

Mariselle Meléndez is Professor of Colonial Spanish American Literatures and Cultures and LAS Alumni Distinguished Professorial Scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. She is also a former Conrad Humanities Scholar (2011-2016) and recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Stipend (1997). Her research focuses on issues of race and gender in colonial Spanish America with special interest in the eighteenth century, the cultural phenomenon of the Enlightenment, food studies, environmental studies, as well as visual studies. She is the author of Deviant and Useful Citizens: The Cultural Production of the Female Body in Eighteenth-Century Peru (Vanderbilt University Press, 2011 & paperback in 2021). Raza, género e hibridez en El lazarillo de ciegos caminantes [Race, Gender, and Hibridity in El lazarillo de ciegos caminantes (University of North Carolina Studies in Romance Languages and Literatures, 1999), and co-editor of Mapping Colonial Spanish America: Places and Commonplaces of Identity, Culture, and Experience (Bucknell University Press, 2002). Her articles have appeared in journals such as: Latin American Research Review, Colonial Latin American Review, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Latin American Literary Review, Hispanic Review, Revista Iberoamericana, Revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana, Dieciocho Hispanic Enlightenment, and Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, among many others. Along with Karen Stolley she co-edited a special issue “The Enlightenment in Colonial Spanish America” in Colonial Latin American Review (2015). Her current book project Fluid Spaces and Transient Bodies: The Cultural and Racial Geography of Spanish American Ports in the Eighteenth Century is in advanced contract with Vanderbilt University Press. She has served in the NEH Review Panel and on the Executive Committee on the Division on Literature of Colonial Spanish America for the Modern Language Association of America (MLA).

Tili Boon Cuillé (Category C: Music, Visual Arts, and Theater)

Tili Boon Cuillé is the author of Divining Nature: Aesthetics of Enchantment in Enlightenment France (Stanford, 2021), made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor, and of Narrative Interludes: Musical Tableaux in Eighteenth-Century French Texts (Toronto, 2006). She is co-editor of Staël’s Philosophy of the Passions: Sensibility, Society, and the Sister Arts (Bucknell, 2013) and of a special issue on “Passion, Perception, and Performance” for Philological Quarterly. She has published articles on natural history, opera, painting, and the novel in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Diderot Studies, Symposium Opera Quarterly, and European Romantic Review, among others. She was a Faculty Fellow at the Center for the Humanities on the subject of “Affect” and participated in the Folger Workshop on “The Languages of Nature: Science, Literature, and the Imagination,” the Bloomington Eighteenth-Century Studies Workshops on “The Magical Eighteenth Century” and “Falsehood, Forgeries, Fraud: The Fake Eighteenth-Century,” the NEH summer seminar at Princeton University on “Opera: Interpretation Between Disciplines,” and the summer seminar at the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies on “Opera in Context: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Creation, Performance, and Reception.” Her recent interests include the history of science, the history of emotion, material culture, and book illustration. She is currently investigating the impact of Antoine Galland’s transcreation of the Mille et une nuits at the beginning of the eighteenth century on French literary, material, and print culture with a focus on the circulation of magical objects across borders, disciplines, and media.

In Professor Cuillé’s graduate and undergraduate seminars, students are invited to investigate French literature and the arts from the vantage of philosophy, aesthetics, literary theory, and cultural studies. Recent topics include economies of desire, the science of sensibility, self-fashioning, and science fiction. She offers inter-arts courses that span the Enlightenment through Modernity on the themes of cultural constructs, transmediation, and virtual reality. She has also taught opera studies courses for the Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities and the Summer Humanities Institute. Professor Cuillé strives to place the students in the position of spectator, critic, or consumer by extending the classroom to include exhibitions and performances. She also co-convenes the Eighteenth-Century Interdisciplinary Salon.

Member-at-Large 1 Candidates

Downing Thomas (Category A: English and American Language and Literatures)

As Professor of French, the bulk of my scholarship in early-modern French studies can be divided into three interdisciplinary areas, with a considerable amount of overlap between areas: music and opera, theories of language, and aesthetics. Music and opera are central to my first two books, both of which were published in (different) series devoted to issues in musicology: Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime: 1647-1785 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002), and Music and the Origins of Language: Theories from the French Enlightenment (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995). I have also begun to explore the developing field of sound studies and am currently writing on the “soundscapes” that the French described during the reciprocal embassies that were part of the diplomatic opening between France and Siam in the 1680s.

My current book project is focused on aesthetic reflection during the early-modern period. I am exploring a series of rich and varied approaches to understanding the mechanisms behind our acts of judgment and the human capacities that are engaged in this process, approaches that grew and evolved during this period but that were effectively shut down in the wake of Immanuel Kant’s philosophy. Using a variety of textual platforms (theater, fiction, public debates, philosophical reflection), early-modern writers explored connections and conflicts between sensation and judgment, reason and imagination, feeling and truth, and the self and others; and they developed models of personal and social engagement that continue to have value in today’s fraught world of polarization and identity politics.

I have edited, with Roberta Marvin, a cross-disciplinary volume of essays in opera studies (Operatic Migrations: Transforming Works and Crossing Boundaries in Musical Drama [Ashgate, 2006]).

Having served over a decade as the University of Iowa’s associate provost and dean of International Programs, I have also published articles and presented numerous lectures focused on aspects of international education, including internationalization strategies for higher education.

Jared Richman (Category C: Music, Visual Arts, and Theater)

Jared Richman received his MA from the University of York (UK) and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. His teaching and research center on the literature and culture of Britain’s Long Eighteenth Century (1660-1832). He teaches courses on disability, satire, British Romanticism, radicalism, the Gothic tradition, Atlantic studies, and comics and graphic narrative. Professor Richman’s work has appeared in such journals as Disability Studies Quarterly, Essays in Romanticism, European Romantic Review, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Eighteenth Century Theory and Interpretation, and Studies in English Literature. He has published on disability and poetic form, the works of William Blake, the fiction of Charlotte Smith and Mary Shelley, John Thelwall’s elocutionary theories, and the poetry of Anna Seward. He is currently finishing a manuscript entitled “Transatlantic Realms”: British Romanticism and the Idea of America, 1780-1832.

Professor Richman’s research has been supported by fellowships from the Library of Congress, the Lewis Walpole Library, Gale-Cenage, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Huntington Library, and the Library Company of Philadelphia. He was recently an M.C. Lang Fellow in Book History, Bibliography, and Humanities at the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School. His latest project traces the relationship between nascent elocutionary theories of the Enlightenment and disability in Anglo-American culture.

Member-at-Large 2 Candidates

Wendy Bellion (Category D: History)

Professor Wendy Bellion (Ph.D. Northwestern University) teaches North American art history. Professor Bellion’s scholarship takes an interdisciplinary approach to American visual and material culture, focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth-century United States and exploring American art within the cultural geographies of the British Atlantic world and early modern Americas. She has served as the Terra Foundation of American Art Visiting Professor in Paris, and she has held research fellowships with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture.

Her current research includes projects about the Peale family, the visual culture of the Chestnut Street Theatre, and a co-edited volume about iconoclasm across the early Americas (with Mónica Domínguez Torres and Jennifer Van Horn). A co-edited special issue about “Revolution” is forthcoming in Journal18 (spring 2026).

Her recent publications include Material Cultures in the Global Eighteenth Century: Art, Mobility, and Change (2023, with co-editor Kristel Smentek; Iconoclasm in New York: Revolution to Reenactment (2019); Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America(2011), which won the Smithsonian’s 2014 Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Outstanding Scholarship; and Objects in Motion: Art and Material Culture across Colonial North America (Winterthur Portfolio,2011, with co-editor Mónica Domínguez Torres). She is a frequent podcast guest, appearing recently on Thing4Things and Worlds Turned Upside Down.

Professor Bellion is a past Director of the University’s Center for Material Culture Studies and has served as Associate Dean for the Humanities in the College of Arts & Sciences. She is currently a member of the American Antiquarian Society’s Advisory Council and will be the Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor at the Clark Art Institute/Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art during 2027-28.

Yota Batsaki (Category D: History)

Since joining Dumbarton Oaks in 2011, Yota Batsaki has developed the research institute’s capacity in the areas of human resources, strategic planning and organizational development, communications and outreach, and partnership building. She supports the institute’s academic programs, including a new program of skill-building fellowships for early-career humanists.

Batsaki holds a PhD in comparative literature from Harvard University. Previously, she was a Fellow and Director of Studies in English at St. John’s College, Cambridge, and a Newton Trust Lecturer in the English Faculty, University of Cambridge. Her research interests lie in Enlightenment political economy and literature; the cultural history of plants in the modern period; and the movement of people, objects, and ideas in the eastern Mediterranean. She has coedited three volumes: The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century, with Sarah Burke Cahalan and Anatole Tchikine (Dumbarton Oaks, 2016); Imperial Geographies in Byzantine and Ottoman Space, with Sahar Bazzaz and Dimiter Angelov (Center for Hellenic Studies, 2013); and Fictions of Knowledge: Fact, Evidence, Doubt, with Subha Mukherji and Jan-Melissa Schramm (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011). Batsaki has held fellowships at the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Cambridge. In 2002, she cofounded the Harvard Summer Program in Greece, where she continues to teach.

At Dumbarton Oaks, Batsaki also leads the Plant Humanities Initiative, originally seeded by a Mellon grant (2018-2023). Through an open access digital platform, the Plant Humanities Lab, and related scholarly programming, the initiative supports the growing field of plant humanities. Batsaki’s recent work has appeared in Environmental Humanities, Environmental History, and Critical Inquiry.

Continuing Executive Board Members:

Elected Members
2022-2025: Member-at-Large, Meghan Roberts (Category D: History)
2022-2025: Member-at-Large, Emily Friedman (Category A: English and American Language and Literature)
2023-2026: Member-at-Large, Barbara Abrams (Category B: Languages and Literatures other than English and American)
2023-2026: Member-at-Large, Karen Stolley (Category B: Languages and Literatures other than English and American)
Past President, Lisa A. Freeman (Category A: English and American Language and Literature)

Appointed Members
Benita Blessing, Executive Director
Joseph Bartolomeo, Treasurer
Manushag “Nush” Powell, Parliamentarian

Depending on the outcome of the elections, the elected 2025-2026 Executive Board will include one of the following disciplinary categories (appointed members – Executive Director, Treasurer, and Parliamentarian – are not part of these categories):

Either:

3, (a) English and American Language and Literatures

3, (b) Languages and Literatures other than English and American

1, (c) Music, Visual Arts, and Performing Arts

3, (d) History

0 (e) All Other Disciplines

Or:

3, (a) English and American Language and Literatures

3, (b) Languages and Literatures other than English and American

2, (c) Music, Visual Arts, and Performing Arts

2, (d) History

0 (e) All Other Disciplines

You can read the official details of our nominating and voting procedures in our Constitution and Bylaws on our Governance page. We have also compiled a list of FAQs about the nominating and election process below; references to Articles and Sections are from that document.

FAQs

Elections

Who can vote in elections?

Members in good standing, defined as members whose ASECS dues are current.

What positions are we voting for?

If the current 1st Vice President agrees to serve as President for the next Board year, that person stands unopposed.
If the 2nd Vice President agrees to serve as 1st Vice President for the next Board year, that person stands unopposed.
The 1st Vice President must be elected.
2 positions for Members-at-Large must be elected.
Any other position that is vacant due to a Board member not fulfilling the term of service.
Candidates are announced at least 100 days before the beginning of the Annual Meeting. (Bylaw 7a)
Candidates submitted by Petition must be received by the Executive Director 65 days before the beginning of the Annual Meeting. (Bylaw 7b)
See the timeline on the Elections page for this year’s dates and deadlines and other election details.

How do we vote?

Current members will receive a link to an electronic ballot on or by 42 days before the Annual Meeting via email. ASECS uses the voting system Election Runner.
The link you receive has a unique User ID that can be used only once. You do not need to log in or remember a password. It’s a very easy system that works from your computer, tablet, or cell phone!
Votes must be cast by 30 days before the Annual Meeting. Election announcements are announced after they are validated, usually within 10 days of the close of voting.
If you do not receive a link to the electronic ballot by email, please:
- Check your spam folder.
- Ensure that you were a current member on the day the ballot was sent out. If you became a member after the ballot was sent out, you will automatically receive a ballot within 1-3 business days.
- Contact the Executive Director Benita Blessing (director@asecs.org) with questions, or if you don’t receive a ballot by the beginning of the election period.
- You can also check whether your membership is current, and make changes yourself by logging in to your profile at https://asecs.press.jhu.edu/membership/profile.

Thank you to everyone for voting in this year’s elections!

Nominations

What does a Nominating Committee do?

o Article VII (“Elections”) of ASECS’s constitution stipulates that the Executive Board appoint a Nominating Committee as part of our annual elections. The committee’s job is to ensure that the election slate follows our society’s rules for open Board vacancies, with attention to the criteria for representation as outlined in our Constitution, accounting for a range of disciplinary fields, ranks, and institutions.

What about other considerations?

o The Board has instructed the Nominating Committee to seek diversity, gender balance, and representation of constituencies that are currently underrepresented both within and outside ASECS.

How does disciplinary representation work?

o We are an interdisciplinary society, and our Constitution thus stipulates that our Board reflect multiple disciplines. Sometimes exceptions must be made to these stipulations, of course, and disciplines are not always clear cut, but in general:

Article VII, Section 2, states that there cannot be more than 3 elected officers (i.e. excluding the Executive Director and the Treasurer) from the same discipline.
Further, according to Section 5, the 2^nd Vice President and 1^st Vice President should not come from the same discipline. Since our current 2^nd Vice President is an historian, nominees for the 2^nd Vice President must come from other disciplines. (You can read more about disciplinary definitions in the Bylaws portion of the document linked above.)

What about the Vice President and President positions?

If the current 2^nd Vice President is willing to advance to the 1^st Vice President position, and if the current 1^st Vice President is willing to advance to the President position, the Nominating Committee does not propose other candidates.

How do I propose a candidate to the Nominating Committee for open positions?

o It’s really easy! Just submit a name of a member and a link to their website (or you can include their c.v.) via the form at the top of this page, and a short note about why you think they would be a good candidate to serve on the Executive Board.

Can I propose myself?

Yes! It’s helpful if you include a brief statement about why you would like to serve on the Executive Board, and feel free to include a c.v. or a link to your website, just like you would if you were nominating someone else.

What happens then?

o The Nominating Committee selects two candidates each for 2^nd Vice President and members at large vacancies according to the criteria above and makes sure they have agreed to run. The Committee forwards its report to the Executive Director, who then sets up the ballot. As per the Constitution, Article VII, Section 5, instructions for additional candidates will be sent out to members. (You can read more about specific deadlines in the Bylaws section of the document linked above.)

o Then we vote! (Only members in good standing are eligible to vote.)

Do you have to be a member to run for office?

o Yes – in order to appear on the ballot, candidates must be members in good standing. It’s easy to join or renew. Just go to this page: ASECS membership

I still have questions about some aspect of the nominating process or election, or about the duties of Executive Board officers.

o You can contact the chair of the nominating committee (n.aljoe@northeastern.edu) or Benita Blessing, Executive Director (director@asecs.org).

On behalf of the Nominating Committee, thank you to everyone who participates in the nominating process.