ASA Announces New JAAC Co-editors

The American Society for Aesthetics is pleased to announce that the ASA Board of Trustees has voted to appoint Jonathan Gilmore and Sandra Shapshay the new co-editors of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (JAAC), published by Oxford University Press. Their five-year term runs from 2023-2027, and they will be eligible for re-appointment.

Gilmore and Shapshay were selected from several very strong applications. All were carefully considered and interviewed by the search committee, chaired by Rachel Zuckert, Northwestern University. The other members of the search committee were David Davies, Theodore Gracyk, Carolyn Korsmeyer, Robert Stecker, and Julie Van Camp (ex officio/non-voting). They succeed current co-editors, Theodore Gracyk and Robert Stecker, who have served as co-editors of JAAC for two five-year terms.

Gilmore received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1999. He is currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at The CUNY Graduate Center and Baruch College. Previously, he was Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Yale University and held a three-year Cotsen Fellowship in The Society of Fellows at Princeton University. He writes on the imagination, philosophy of literature, philosophy of painting and sculpture, artistic style, censorship and freedom of expression, 20th-century European Philosophy (particularly Merleau-Ponty), ethics and aesthetics, theories of the emotions, the cognitive science of art, and the history of Modern Art. He is also a widely published art critic.

Shapshay also earned her Ph.D. at Columbia University (in 2001). Currently she is Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College & the CUNY Graduate Center. Before coming to CUNY in 2019, she taught at Indiana University-Bloomington for 17 years. Her research centers on aesthetics and ethics in the 19th c. (with focus on Schopenhauer and Kant), environmental aesthetics, theories of the sublime, and the aesthetics & ethics of public commemorative art such as monuments and memorials. In 2018 she co-edited with Levi Tenen, a JAAC special issue, “The Good, the Beautiful and the Green: Aesthetics and Environmentalism.”

The new co-editors anticipate enhancing the Journal’s on-line presence and advancing the gains the Journal has made in publishing authors, and reviewing books by authors, who belong to underrepresented minority groups in philosophy. They also aim to bring the work and relevance of aestheticians and philosophers of art to the attention of museum curators, gallerists, contemporary artists, musicians, dramaturges, art writers, and all manner of art practitioners/appreciators.

The American Society for Aesthetics was founded in 1942 to promote study, research, discussion, and publication in aesthetics. "Aesthetics," in this connection, is understood to include all studies of the arts and related types of experience from a philosophic, scientific, or other theoretical standpoint, including those of psychology, sociology, anthropology, cultural history, art criticism, and education. "The arts" include the visual arts, literature, music, and theater arts.

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, owned and published by the ASA since 1945, publishes current research articles, symposia, special issues, and timely reviews of books in aesthetics and the philosophy of art. The philosophy of art includes scholarship examining the nature, meaning and value of the arts, considered generally or individually, where the arts are taken in the broadest possible sense. Aesthetics includes work on aesthetic experiences and values wherever they are found both in and beyond the arts.