Election of new ASA Trustees and Vice-President

The American Society for Aesthetics will conduct an election for three new trustees and a new Vice-President in December 2022. As provided in the ASA By-laws, Article VII, the current Board of Trustees has nominated six ASA members to stand for election as trustee. The Trustees have nominated two ASA members for Vice-President. The new Vice-President will serve a two-year term from February 1, 2023 - January 31, 2025, and will then ascend to the Presidency for two years. The trustees elected will serve for three-year terms (February 1, 2023 - January 31, 2026).

NOMINEES FOR ASA VICE-PRESIDENT

• James Shelley is Lloyd and Sandra Nix Endowed Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University, where he recently stepped down as department chair. He is author of historically informed papers on the nature of aesthetic value, the objectivity of aesthetic judgment, and the aesthetic status of artworks. He has served the ASA as trustee, as program chair of the annual meeting and of two regional meetings, as member of seven program committees, and as co-founder of the Southern Division. Currently, he serves as an aesthetics section editor of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. One of his primary goals for the society is to expand its community by enlarging the set of problems, methodologies, and histories it regards as central to aesthetics; another is to redouble efforts to raise the visibility of aesthetics, both within and without the profession.  
  
  
• Rachel Zuckert is a professor of philosophy at Northwestern University. She has published two books -- Kant on Beauty and Biology (2007) and Herder's Naturalist Aesthetics (2019) – as well as many articles in the history of aesthetics. She has been a member of the ASA for more than 20 years and is grateful for the stimulating and supportive intellectual environment it has offered – and, in turn, has been honored to serve the ASA as trustee, as program chair for the national meeting, as a member of the editorial board of  JAAC and as chair of the search committee for the new JAAC editors. She is dedicated to ensuring the on-going viability of the ASA and as academic institutions, and to expanding its inclusiveness and support, particularly for precariously employed scholars.
  
  

NOMINEES FOR ASA TRUSTEE

• Christopher Bartel is Professor of Philosophy at Appalachian State University and an Adjunct Research Fellow at Charles Sturt University. His research interests primarily focus on video games, music, and media ethics. He is the author of Video Games, Violence, and the Ethics of Fantasy: Killing Time (Bloomsbury 2020) and is currently writing his second book, Aesthetics and Video Games (Bloomsbury). His essays have appeared in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism as well as in the British Journal of Aesthetics, Contemporary Aesthetics, Ethics and Information Technology, and the European Journal of Philosophy. His service to the ASA includes twice co-chairing of the Eastern Division Meeting, serving on the program committee for the national meeting, and organizing small workshops in various capacities. His goals for the ASA include developing and implementing procedures to track how attendance at ASA events contributes to first-time attendees later becoming members of the society.
  
  
• Kristin Boyce is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Mississippi State University. I have been an ACLS New Faculty Fellow at Johns Hopkin's Humanities Center and a Resident fellow at NYU's Center for Ballet and the Arts. My primary interests lie in the evolving conversation between philosophy and the arts and my current research develops those interests in a book project, Diotima at the Ballet: The Place of Love in Philosophy and the Arts. I have been on the organizing committee for both Eastern Division and National meetings of the ASA and I am currently organizing a conference that will brings together poets, dancers and choreographers with scholars in philosophical aesthetics, critical race theory, and performance studies. As a trustee, my primary goal would be to foster more robust participation in the ASA from artists and from scholars in fields that are adjacent to the academic discipline of philosophical aesthetics.


• Michalle Gal is Associate Professor of Philosophy in the History and Philosophy of Art and Design at Shenkar College, of which she is the former head, as well as chair of the research committee of graduate students. She on the program committee of the 80th annual meeting. She is the author of books on aestheticism, visual metaphors, and design, and has published and edited special volumes on topics ranging from formalism, conceptualism, and “visualism”, to aesthetics of design and its relations to ethics, politics, and critical thought. The ASA is significant community for her, and she intends to encourage and invest efforts in: supporting young scholars in the market and publications; forming platforms for collaborations of research, funding applications, and editorial projects between members; bringing international new members, which from her experience as an active collaborator with colleagues from around the world, she believes has great prospects.


• Brandon Polite is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Knox College in Galesburg, IL. His research is primarily on the social dimension of our aesthetic lives. He is also host of the YouTube series Polite Conversations: Philosophers Discuss the Arts (https://www.youtube.com/c/PhilosophersDiscussingArt), which, in addition to being a teaching resource, aims to showcase the cool and innovative work that’s happening in the field of aesthetics to the wider philosophical community and the general public. His main goals for the ASA are to bring the field of aesthetics to as wide an audience as possible and for the society to continue making strides toward diversifying its membership.


• Sonia Sedivy is Professor of Philosophy in the tri-campus University of Toronto. Her research focuses on aesthetics, philosophy of perception and the later Wittgenstein. She is especially interested in the diversity of visual arts, aesthetic properties, values, and beauty. Her Beauty and the End of Art: Wittgenstein, Plurality and Perception uses Wittgenstein and contemporary philosophy of perception to better understand the diversity of beauty and visual art.  She recently edited Art, Representation, and Make-Believe: Essays on the Philosophy of Kendall L. Walton.  She was Program Chair for the 2021 Annual Meeting of the ASA.  She is committed to the diversity of all things and people, and her primary aim would be to promote greater inclusivity and outreach, as well as more dialogue with other areas of philosophy, related disciplines and practitioners. As former Chair of Philosophy at University of Toronto Scarborough, she would bring administrative expertise and creative problem solving.
  
  
• Michel-Antoine Xhignesse is an Instructor of Philosophy at Capilano University, in North Vancouver, BC. He has been an active ASA member since 2013 and has helped to organize several ASA meetings (Eastern 2019, 2020, 2021; Annual 2018, 2021). He is co-editor of the ASA Newsletter, a former managing editor and advisor for ASAGE, and compiled the fifth edition of the Graduate Guide. His research focuses on the ontology of art and on truth in fiction, and occasionally dabbles in Schopenhauer. He is the author of the forthcoming Aesthetics: 50 Puzzles, Paradoxes, and Thought Experiments (Routledge, January 2023) and has published on aesthetics in the BJA and several generalist journals. He intends to work to make the ASA an even better hub for the intellectual and professional development of new scholars, to forge new interdisciplinary connections, and to promote the importance and visibility of aesthetics to philosophy more broadly.

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 (December 3, 2022). 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 4-31, 2022, with an announcement of winners in early January. All members of ASA in 2022 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, 2022, and will be sent a mail-in ballot; notification should be sent to the ASA mailing address, above. Eva Dadlez, Charles Peterson, and Brian Soucek will complete their terms as trustees on January 31, 2023. 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.