Aesthetics for Birds

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ASA Elections: Cast Your Votes by December 31!

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The American Society for Aesthetics (ASA) is currently holding elections for three trustee positions. The three elected trustees will serve three-year terms (February 1, 2020 – January 31, 2023).

Brief bios for the nominees appear below the fold.

The deadline to vote is December 31, 2019. Results will be announced in early January. Everyone who is currently holds a 2019 ASA membership is eligible to vote.

Notably, the ASA allows cumulative voting: Each member gets three votes, and can cast all anywhere between one and three votes for the each person. For example, members can vote once for three different people, or spend all three votes on one person.

To vote, click here.

Trustee nominees (six nominees for three open slots)

Renee Conroy is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University Northwest and a Fulbright Scholar. An active member of the ASA since 2006, Conroy has co-chaired two Pacific Division Meetings (2013, 2014), acted as local organizer for one Annual Meeting (2016), and served on the Selma Jeanne Cohen Prize in Dance Aesthetics review committee four times, twice as chair. Conroy’s publications focus on dance and theatrical performance, philosophy of nature, and the aesthetics of commerce with the past. She co-edited a symposium on dance for the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (2013), and has been published in journals such as Ethics, Place and Environment and Midwest Studies in Philosophy, in addition to anthologies by Continuum, Bloomsbury, Springer, Brill, Dance Books, and Routledge. Her priorities for the ASA include continued support for graduate students, substantive grant opportunities for new projects, and increased integration between the work of professional artists and the society.

Eva M. Dadlez is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Central Oklahoma. She received her Ph.D. from Syracuse University. She writes on issues at the intersection (often at the collision) of aesthetics, ethics and epistemology and is especially interested in encouraging graduate and undergraduate work that delves into such areas. She has written two books on the preceding: What’s Hecuba to Him? Fictional Events and Actual Emotions (1997) and Mirrors to One Another: Emotion and Value in Jane Austen and David Hume (2009), as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters. She has most recently edited a collection entitled Jane Austen’s Emma: Philosophical Perspectives for Oxford University Press (2018). Dadlez also publishes on issues in feminist ethics. She was an ASA trustee 2008-2010, she has reviewed for JAAC, served as program co-chair for Pacific division ASA, and is past president of the Southwestern Philosophical Society. See her CV here.

Shen-yi (Sam) Liao is (untenured) Associate Professor of Philosophy at University of Puget Sound. As an intellectual omnivore, he has worked on imagination, experimental philosophical aesthetics, and more. He is enthusiastic about making philosophy, and philosophical aesthetics, more welcoming for members of historically and currently oppressed groups. He has been involved in the ASA diversity committee and was the ASA-sponsored speaker for the 2018 Summer Immersion Program in Philosophy at Brown University. In addition, he has served on the 2016 and 2020 ASA Annual Meeting Program Committee, semi-regularly contributed to Aesthetics for Birds, and reviewed quite a few manuscripts in aesthetics for both specialist and generalist journals.

Charles Peterson is Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Oberlin College. He received his doctorate from the Philosophy, Interpretation and Culture program at Binghamton University. His research interests include Africana Philosophy, Cultural Theory, and Aesthetics. Peterson organized the 2017 conference “Exploring Beauty and Truth in Worlds of Color: Race and Aesthetics”  and co-edited (w/ A. W. Eaton) the JAAC special issue, “Race and Aesthetics” (Vol. 77: 4). His publications include the co-edited volume De-Colonizing the Academy  and DuBois, Fanon, Cabral: The Margins of Elite Anti-Colonial Leadership. His  goals for the ASA include: 1) Expanding the reach and membership of the ASA to broaden the ASA’s areas and modes of inquiry and discussion; 2) Increasing diversity among our membership, as the ASA’s relative homogeneity is not reflective of much of the work being done in Aesthetics within and without the discipline of Philosophy; 3) programs that support underrepresented graduate students and junior faculty.

Sandra Shapshay is Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College–CUNY. Her research areas are aesthetics and ethics in the 19th c, with focus on Schopenhauer and Kant, and environmental aesthetics. With Levi Tenen, Shapshay edited a JAAC special issue, “The Good, the Beautiful and the Green” (2018).  Other publications include: “Contemporary Environmental Aesthetics and the Neglect of the Sublime” (BJA, 2013) and “The Problem with the Problem of Tragedy: Schopenhauer’s Solution Revisited” (BJA, 2012).  With Steve Cahn and Taffy Ross, she is editing Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology 2nd ed.(Blackwell), and her current book project is titled “An Aesthetics of Monuments and Memorials.” Committee work includes Program Committee (2016), and organizing ASA panels at the APA CD (2020, 2021). As Trustee, Shapshay would make it a priority to work on further diversification of the field via graduate student fellowships for underrepresented groups, and on supporting cross-disciplinary conference initiatives.

Brian Soucek is Professor of Law at the University of California, Davis, where he teaches and publishes on constitutional law, LGBT rights, antidiscrimination law, and intersections between law and aesthetics. A philosopher of art since before he became a law professor (Ph.D. Columbia, 2006), Brian has published in the JAAC, BJA, and NDPR, spoken at 14 of the last 16 ASA Annual Meetings, and benefitted tremendously from ASA-funded seminars, workshops, and competitions. As Trustee, Brian wants to: help expand the terrific support the ASA has been providing member projects like these; facilitate ways for philosophers of art to apply their expertise beyond philosophy, including in law; and continue pushing the ASA towards more transparent, member-focused, less legalistic ways of dealing with discrimination and harassment and promoting diversity of membership and interests within the Society.

Image credit: “Don’t Forget to Vote” by Thomas Hawk

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