ASA Announces Election of Vice-President and Trustees

The American Society for Aesthetics is pleased to announce the election of three new trustees and a new 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).

The new ASA Vice-President is James Shelley the 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.

The three new trustees are Michalle Gal, Brandon Polite, and Sonia Sedivy.

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 will bring administrative expertise and creative problem solving.

Voting was conducted on the ASA web site from December 4-31, 2022. All members of ASA in 2022 were eligible to vote. 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 "About ASA" red button in the upper-right and click the "ASA Organization" sub-menu.

Congratulations to the winners of the election. Our thanks to everyone who agreed to stand for election.