President’s Column

The prospect of our meeting at the Sheraton Philadelphia Downtown in a few short weeks brings me joy. I hope you too are finding joy where you can, whether in Bad Bunny at the Superbowl, in the approach of spring, or in the restoration of the installation detailing the lives of the nine enslaved people, so recently scraped from the walls of Independence National Historic Park, just 11 blocks from our conference hotel. If you have not yet registered and reserved your hotel room in our room block, please do so and join in the conversation. You can read more about conference plans below.

As we mark a return to an in-person conference, we also celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Women’s Caucus. Ruth Perry recounts the Caucus’s origins in a narrative that makes clear the importance of access and belonging in her recent ECS piece. In 1975, when ISECS had put forward an all-male slate for Board elections, Jean Perkins (French, Swarthmore) objected. R.S. Leigh retorted “which women could we possibly think could be eligible for this august body?” That moment crystalized an effort to present by petition a slate of women to run for the ISECS Board; every woman on that list was elected. It also launched the Caucus lunch which, this year, will be open to guests. T-shirts are also in the works.

We continue to monitor the situation at Bucknell UP, with thanks to Jeremy Chow for being our advocate on the ground. While on the theme of presses and publishing, I want to make a special plea on behalf of our journal and book review editors at ECS and SECC. We are all busy, but our continued ability to publish timely reviews and the new work that keeps the field vital depends on volunteer reviewers, so please say yes whenever you possibly can.

This year’s elections for our officers will open March 13 on our new platform, which makes voting easier. We are fostering an ever-renewing eighteenth century studies for an age that never wanted it so much. The current search for our next secretary is also open, and the committee (Jeff Ravel, Elena Deanda-Camacho, and Al Coppola) welcome applications.

At a time when fear and nihilism are grave temptations, join us in Philadelphia and raise a glass to joyful community, vibrant diversity, and endless curiosity about the eighteenth century.

In solidarity,
Misty G. Anderson

Conference Update

ASECS 56th Annual Meeting
Philadelphia, April 9 – 11

The in-person meeting at the Sheraton Philadelphia Downtown is just a few weeks away! If you haven’t registered yet, please jump over to our Membership page, login or create a new login if this is your first time, and register now. Our wonderful program committee has put together a transit guide, which is a paragon of lucidity, as well as additional resources here, including a list of restaurants, sites, and museums offering free or discounted admission with your conference badge. Tickets for The Contrast are still available for each night of the conference; use the code ASECS2026 at checkout. Each night, groups will gather near the 17th Street entrance of the hotel to venture out together.

You can also look forward to social time at the Members’ Reception on Thursday and at the Caucuses and Affiliates Reception on Friday, open to all and sponsored by the family of the late Donald Mell. These events and gatherings are good ways to find community and pursue conversations about your work, whether you are new or returning to the conference.

The updated program is live on our website. The conference app is soon to follow, with new functions, such as the option to upload slides and images. We encourage accessibility copies. We will also have a rudimentary pdf of the program at the registration desk.

Devon Binder from Red Door Alliance will be on site with us for the whole conference, and is reachable at asecseventplanner@gmail.com. Martine DiDonato, our interim Executive Director, will be on site as well and can be reached through director@asecs.org. We’re very grateful to both of them for all their help in making this historic gathering, during our nation’s semiquincentennial year, a meeting to remember.

Image Credit: Detail, William Russell Birch, Arch Street Ferry, Philadelphia, 1800 (ca. 1860), Library Company of Philadelphia.

It’s important to make your reservation within the official contracted ASECS hotel block, which closes March 10! We receive concessions as part of the hotel contract, which allow us to offer lower room rates and support for NTT and graduate student attendees, while keeping the conference registration fees affordable.

By staying at the Sheraton Downtown Philadelphia, you’ll have better networking opportunities, easy accessibility, and free wifi. Plus, you’ll be supporting the financial stability of ASECS.

Image Credit: Robert Indiana, LOVE (1976)

French Studies Dinner

Society for Eighteenth-Century French Studies will be hosting its annual ASECS dinner at Frieda, 320 Walnut Street, on Friday, April 10th at 7, when dix-huitièmistes will gather for good food, good conversation and to discuss potential topics for SECFS panels at ASECS in Portland in 2027. A 40-minute walk or 15-minute drive from the conference hotel, the restaurant is BYOB, with Fine Wine and Good Spirits nearby at 724 South Street. Dinner will be $60 for graduate students, contingent, part-time, and non-tenure-track faculty and $75 for tenure-line faculty. The easiest way to pay is to send Flora Champy a Zelle payment in advance using the email address fchampy@princeton.edu. Otherwise, payment can be made with cash or check the night of the event. The restaurant is also able to accept a small handful of credit cards with a surcharge of 2.5%.

Philadelphia Archive Visit

Philadelphia boasts a wealth of archives and special collections that are of immense value to eighteenth-century scholars working on natural history, natural philosophy, medicine and other practical and technical arts. On the day before the conference program begins, the Science Studies Caucus has arranged a visit to the American Philosophical Society and Science History Institute to explore their collections and view some of their treasures.

On Wednesday, April 8, we will gather at the hotel at 1:30 and head over to the libraries, which are located across the street from each other next to Independence Hall. The outing is open to any ASECS member with an interest in the sciences of our period. Space is limited to 20, so please RSVP to caucus co-chair Anita Guerrini if you wish to attend.

Image Credit: Amédée François Frézier, Traité Des Feux d’Artifice Pour Le Spectacle, 1706. https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/mhwi7ch Featured in the Science History Institute exhibition “Flash! Bang! Boom! A History of Fireworks,” opening April 10.

2026 Elections

The 2026–2027 ASECS election cycle is now underway. The election slate was published on February 12, 2026. Nominations were closed on February 26, and electronic ballots will circulate on March 13. Members are encouraged to review candidate materials here and participate in the vote promptly, once electronic ballots are distributed.

Members will elect three new Executive Board officers: a Second Vice President and two Members-at-Large—their terms will begin in July 2026. The candidates for Second Vice President are Tili Boon Cuillé (Washington University in St. Louis) and Mariselle Meléndez (University of Illinois Champaign). Standing for Member-at-Large are Jared Richman (Colorado College) and Downing Thomas (University of Iowa), and Yota Batsaki (Dumbarton Oaks) and Wendy Bellion (University of Delaware).

Journals

Eighteenth-Century Studies

Since the last newsletter, there have been two new issues of Eighteenth-Century Studies, ASECS’s quarterly journal edited by Ramesh Mallipeddi. Volume 59, number 1, released in Fall 2025, features a special issue on “Eighteenth-Century Coasts,” edited by Alexander Dick and Eric Gigal. A roundtable on “Geographies, Ecologies, Temporalities” includes contributions by Claire Connolly, Samuel Diener, Isaac Land, Killian Quigley, Emma Hart, Miles Ogborn, Steve Mentz and Gerard Lee McKeever. In addition, there are three articles: “Western Man’s Animals, or, Slavery and the Extra-Human Energies of Oyster Shells on the West African Coast” by Anna Feuerstein, “Transverse Specimens: Coral in Eighteenth-Century Science and Culture” by Anna K. Sagal, and “Brethren of the Coast: Interracial Community in William Williams’s Mr. Penrose” by Patrick McBurnie-Nicolay. Fall 2025 also includes reviews of 13 new books, edited by Mark Vareschi.

The most recent number of Eighteenth-Century Studies, Volume 59, number 2 (winter 2026) is a special issue devoted to “The ASECS Women’ Caucus at 50,” edited by Nicole Aljoe, Mona Narain, and Francesca Savoia. Essays by Ruth Perry and Susan S. Lanser reflect on “Beginnings and Continuities,” and a “Roundtable on Professional Issues” includes contributions by Elena Deanda-Camacho, Miriam L. Wallace, Susan Dalton and Rebecca Cypess. The “Roundtable on Pedagogy” features four essays, two of which were collectively authored. Nine of our colleagues, as well as four undergraduate students, contributed their perspectives to this conversation. In addition, the special issue features two articles of new research: “Oroonokos’ Rape Cultures” by Jeremy Chow and “Sisters but Not Women? Queer Kinship and Salvific Androgyny in Ephrata’s Celibate Sisterhood” by Anca Wilkening. The Winter 2026 issue also includes 12 new book reviews.

There is still time to respond to the call for papers for the next special issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies. Guest editors Ruth Mack and Crystal B. Lake are accepting proposals for “Practical Knowledge in the Enlightenment” through June 1. Research papers of 7,500 to 9,000 words for consideration should be sent to ec.studies@ubc.ca.

Image Credit: Detail, Louis François Gérard van der Puyl, Portrait of Thomas Payne with His Family and Friends (1787), Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture

There is a new volume of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture coming in March. This annual publishes scholarship originally presented at an ASECS-affiliated conference, or any work publicly presented by an ASECS member, in the past two years. Volume 55, 2026 features clusters of shorter essays derived from conference panels on Free Indirect Discourse, Indigenous Critique, and the representation of queer eighteenth-century pirates in the HBO show Our Flag Means Death. Individual essays cover the possibilities of gender-fluid play in early nineteenth-century paper dolls (Marlis Schweitzer); Chardin’s pastels (Heather McPherson); taste-making women art collectors in Paris (Natasha Shoory); a reassessment of the taste debate between artists and antiquarians (Sarah Carter); the importance of commonplacing in Ignatius Sancho’s letters (Moinak Choudury); an Islamic Traveller’s view of Ranelagh (Humberto Garcia); the social and economic theory of prostitution in Paris (Cecilia Feilla); as well as Lisa A. Freeman’s 2024 Presidential Address, an analysis of race and performance in Edward Young’s play, The Revenge.

SECC editor George Boulukos is pleased to announce that Allison Cardon has come aboard as a new Associate Editor for the annual. She is the Mellon Public History Fellow at the Henry Sheldon Museum of Vermont History, having previously held appointments at Middlebury College, Hamilton College, and the College of Wooster after earning her Ph.D. in English Literature from SUNY Buffalo. A co-chair of ASECS’ Race and Empire Caucus, she currently serves on the MLA Executive Committee for Law and Humanities. Allison reports that she looks forward to fostering rigorous, timely scholarly conversations and critical inquiry in the pages of SECC.

The annual has also expanded its advisory board to eight members, and we thank the following scholars for the generosity of their time and expertise: Scott Brueninger, Virginia Commonwealth University, History/Enlightenment; Rachael Givens Johnson, Brigham Young University, Spanish; Tracy Rutler, Penn State University, French/Queer Theory; Jeanne Britton, University of South Carolina, Material Culture; Miles Grier, Queens College, CUNY, Theater/Restoration; Sarah Cohen, University at Albany, Art History/French; Jennifer Van Horn, University of Delaware, Art History/American; and Rebecca Geoffroy-Schwinden, University of North Texas, Music.

Submissions for the next volume of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture are due on August 15, and they should be sent to secc@asecs.org. The editors welcome clusters based on panels or individual essays.

Image Credit: Detail, Unknown, Listening to the News (17th century), Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Our Community

ASA – ASECS 18th-Century Africa Publication Fellowship

With the generous funding of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the African Studies Association (ASA) and the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies (ASECS) have collaborated for two years in the joint 18th-Century Africa Publication Fellowship. In the 2025 edition, twelve fellows participated in publishing mentorships at both ASA and ASECS meetings and prepared their work for submission to each associations’ journals. The 2025 Fellows are: Justine “Tola” Ajao (University of Toronto), Jessica M. Johnson (University of Oregon), Deena Al-halabieh (University of California, Santa Barbara), Ethan Key (Boston University), Allegra Ayida (Yale University), Umar Sheikh Tahir (Columbia University), Jack Casey (New York University), Tim Soriano (University of Illinois, Chicago), A. Véronique Charles (Columbia University), Matthew Steele (Yale University), Myriam Carmen Iuorio (University of Toronto), and Duangkamol Tantirungkij (City University of New York).

At the ASECS conference in Philadelphia, Ajao, Key, Soriano and Iuorio will present their work at the panel “Africa’s Eighteenth Century,” chaired by Steven W. Thomas (Tennessee Tech University), along with Rebecca Mitsein, who was one of the 2025 ASA-ASECS mentors. This panel will take place on Friday, April 10 at 4:30 PM on Freedom H at the Sheraton Hotel in Philadelphia. Applications for the 2026 cohort closed on February 27, 2026. This grant fosters collaboration between ASECS and ASA members, and, in that spirit, we encourage ASECS membership to submit panel proposals and papers to ASA’s conference on December 3-6, 2026 in New Orleans (the deadline is March 15, 2026). For questions, please email director@asecs.org, and members@africanstudies.org.

Image Credit: Raphaelle Peale and Moses Williams, Moses Williams, Cutter of Profiles (1803), Library Company of Philadelphia.

ACLS

The American Council of Learned Societies, of which ASECS is a member, recently made some major constitutional and structural changes, which include a series of four delegate forums across the year, intended to identify and prioritize goals for the group moving forward. At the most recent (third) forum, ACLS President Joy Connolly announced DASSH (Defending the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities), an initiative that will kick off in March 2026 with networking events in San Francisco and Los Angeles. DASSH seeks to widen our circle and build community and alliances outside of academia. Email dassh@acls.org for more information. Please see also the ACLS update on their new Strategic Framework: Bold Action for Growth and Strength. The deadline for the ACLS Leading Edge Fellowship Program, which places recent humanities PhDs with nonprofit organizations committed to promoting justice and equity in their communities, is March 11, 2026. Thanks to our ASECS delegate to ACLS, Manushag N. Powell, for keeping us informed.

ISECS

The International Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies (ISECS) sponsors a wide range of conferences that might be of interest to members. Please see this link for details. Also, in July 2027 the ISECS International conference will celebrate the 60th anniversary of ISECS in Zaragoza, Spain in three official languages (Spanish, English, French) and will encourage more delegates from Latin America. Please consider applying when the CFP is available later this year. Zaragoza is a gorgeous, historically rich, and easily navigable city that can be reached by train from Madrid (1.5 hours) and Barcelona (2 hours). Susan Carlyle (California State University, Long Beach) is the ASECS representative at ISECS.