ASA Announces Nominations for Vice-President and Trustee

The American Society for Aesthetics is pleased to announce biographical statements from the two nominees for Vice-President and six nominees for ASA Trustee.

For Vice-President (electing one)

  Sherri Irvin is a professor of philosophy and senior associate dean of the Graduate College at the University of Oklahoma. She has been a member of the ASA for 20 years and has served as trustee and as program chair for the Annual and Pacific Division meetings. She serves on the editorial board of JAAC and is an aesthetics section editor of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. She has published on many topics, ranging from the ontology of contemporary art to body aesthetics. The ASA has been an important professional and intellectual home for her, and she intends to work toward a situation in which more scholars of color, LGBTQ+ scholars, and disabled scholars find a true home here. She also believes the ASA should expand initiatives to support junior scholars in aesthetics as job prospects remain under threat.

  Paul C. Taylor teaches at Vanderbilt University, where he is a W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy and chair of the philosophy department. He has earned degrees from Morehouse College, Rutgers University, and the Kennedy School. His research focuses primarily on aesthetics, critical race theory, and Africana philosophy. His books include Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics, which received the ASA’s monograph prize in 2017.  A longtime member of the ASA, Taylor served on the ASA’s first diversity committee (2009) and has since served on the annual meeting program committee (2010 and 2017) and on the board of trustees (2017-20). Taylor would have three primary goals as a member of the ASA leadership: 1) making aesthetics a more visible and viable area for professional philosophers; 2) bolstering the sustainability and efficiency of ASA operations; and 3) expanding the ASA community and its horizons. 

For Trustee (electing three)

  Gemma Argüello Manresa is a researcher, professor and independent curator based in Mexico City. She has a degree in Sociology from National Autonomous University of Mexico, a Master in Aesthetics in Contemporary Art and a PhD at the Department of Philosophy from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She is Secretary of Academic Affairs and Lecturer in Philosophy at UNAM, researcher for the National Research System in Mexico, and Chair of the Feminist Caucus and Social Media Editor for ASA. Her research focuses on processual art using participatory and collaborative strategies, but also on electronic art, art and science and net-art. Her recent research topics are migration, gender violence, art and public space criticism and Latin American political art during the 70s. She is currently co-curating an exhibition and participatory art program based at the Laboratorio Arte Alameda in Mexico City and she is developing an art-education program for Mexican museums.

  Aili Bresnahan (www.artistsmatter.com ) is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Dayton and is a 2020-21  Fulbright Research Scholar for “Cross-Cultural Ethical Agency in Dance and Philosophy” at the Centre for Dance Research at Roehampton University in London. She is a former professional-level ballet dancer with a PhD in philosophy from Temple University and a JD from Georgetown University Law Center. Her primary areas of research are in the philosophy of dance and performance, improvisation, interpretation, and style. Among publications in philosophy and in dance studies journals and anthologies, she is the author of “The Philosophy of Dance” entry for The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Her service to the ASA includes Co-Chairing the ASA Eastern Division meeting, ASA national program committee membership, Vice-Chairing the ASA’s Diversity Caucus, and being Editor and Mentor for ASAGE. Goals include being part of ASA executive decision-making and supporting its diversity and equity efforts. (Photo by Sheila Lintott)

  John Carvalho is Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University and Associate Editor of Contemporary Aesthetics. He coordinated local arrangements for the 50th anniversary meeting of the ASA in 1992, served on the Program Committee in 2007, 2015 and 2017, and chaired the Outstanding Monograph in Aesthetics Committee. He chaired the Eastern Division meeting in 1999 and 2000, serving on the Eastern Division Program Committee from 1997-2002 and in 2009. He served on the Aesthetics Advisory Committee of the APA from 2005-2008. He is the author of Thinking with Images: An Enactivist Aesthetics (Routledge 2018) and of essays published in journals and anthologies including the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Contemporary Aesthetics, the British Journal of Aesthetics, Oxford Handbook of Sound and Imagination, Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music and many others. His goals for the ASA are to encourage participation by a diverse group of younger scholars.

  Ivan Gaskell is Professor of Cultural History at Bard Graduate Center. An active member since 1998, Gaskell has spoken at thirteen ASA meetings. He is a long-term member of the Feminist Caucus Committee, and joined the Diversity Committee at its inception. He has contributed three articles to JAAC, for which he regularly reviews submissions. Gaskell served on the Program Committee three times, and was a trustee between 2004 and 2007. The author of numerous articles and chapters in philosophy, history, and art history, he has published sixteen books, including Paintings and the Past: Philosophy, History, Art (2019). As an interdisciplinary scholar, and an immigrant of culturally and ethnically mixed origins, Gaskell's ambitions for the ASA include expanding its fields of inquiry, enhancing membership diversification by inviting participation by scholars of color, fostering the empowerment of women members, and supporting students and early career scholars through programing and grants.

  C. Thi Nguyen is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah. He has recently published aesthetics work in Mind, Phil Imprint, Ergo, and Phil Review — and a book, Games: Agency as Art. He has served as the Program Chair of the 2020 ASA Annual, Chair of the Diversity Committee, and organized a number of workshops in aesthetics. He is also Associate Editor of Aesthetics for Birds, and Associate Producer of aesthetics content for the YouTube philosophy channel, Wireless Philosophy. His goals for the ASA include working to increase the visibility of aesthetics in the profession and the world at large. Aesthetics work is among the most sensitive and exciting in philosophy, and its lowly status deserves correction. Bringing aesthetics to a wider audience is a long-term plan for increasing the number of jobs in aesthetics. His goals also include diversifying the ASA, in content and membership.

  Mariana Ortega is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy,  Women's, Gender, and Sexualities, and Latina/o Studies at Penn State.  Her main research areas are Latina/x Feminisms, Phenomenology (Heidegger), Critical Philosophy of Race, and Aesthetics. She is author of In-Between:  Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self. She is co-editor with Andrea Pitts and José Medina of Theories of the Flesh, Latinx and Latin American Feminisms, Transformation and Resistance and (with Linda Martín-Alcoff) of Constructing the Nation:  A Race and Nationalism Reader. She has served on the ASA Program Committee,  Diversity Committee, and Feminist Caucus.  Her goals for ASA: (1) highlighting  various  social identities, especially race, as well as gender, sexuality, class, ability, and nationality in aesthetics; (2) rethinking current structures to ensure continued support and recruiting of graduate students and faculty from various social identities; (3) supporting intellectual work on aesthetics that is attuned to contemporary socio-political pressing issues.

The three trustees elected will serve for three-year terms (February 1, 2021 - January 31, 2024). The Vice-President will serve from February 1, 2021 – January 31, 2023 and will then become President for a two-year term. The nominations have been announced on the ASA Web site and via e-mail to all members. Bios of the nominees also will be available in the December 2020 ASA Newsletter.

As provided in the ASA By-laws, Article VII, additional nominations can be made by any eight members of the Society. All such additional nominations, with the signatures of eight supporting members, must be filed with the Secretary-Treasurer no later than the two weeks following the annual meeting (November 28, 2020). These can be sent by e-mail (secretary-treasurer@aesthetics-online.org) or through the US Mail (American Society for Aesthetics, 1550 Larimer Street #644, Denver, CO 80202-1602).

Voting will be conducted on the ASA web site from December 1-31, 2020, with an announcement in early January. All members of ASA in 2020 are eligible to vote by logging into the web site, looking for the red "Members" button in the upper-right, and clicking the "Trustee elections" sub-menu. Members unable to vote on-line should notify the Secretary-Treasurer no later than December 1, 2020, and will be sent a mail-in ballot; notification should be sent to the ASA mailing address, above.

María José Alcaraz León, John Gibson, and Jonathan Neufeld will complete their terms as trustees on January 31, 2021. For more information on the current trustees and the ASA By-laws, see the ASA Web page (http://aesthetics-online.org). Look for the "ASA" red button in the upper-right and click the "About the ASA" sub-menu.