ASECS at 50: Interview with Paula Backscheider
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Paula Backscheider, a founding member and former President of ASECS, is Philpott-Stevens Eminent Scholar at Auburn University. She has published seven monographs, among which are Daniel Defoe: His Life (1989), winner of the British Council Prize for Best Book in the Humanities; Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England (1993); Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre (2005), cowinner of the MLA James Russell Lowell Prize; and Elizabeth Singer Rowe and the Development of the English Novel (2013). She is currently at work on Crisis Texts: Staging Wartime Women.
A news release dated September 9, 1969 announced the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies as "the newest of the interdisciplinary 'period' organizations."1 It acknowledged the Renaissance Society of America for having already established a successful model of scholarly "cooperation," a version of which would be salutary for scholars of the eighteenth century. The first annual meeting of ASECS was then held on April 17–18, 1970 at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. The program includes a statement declaring the Society's dedication to "fostering interdisciplinary awareness and cooperation between scholars in different fields."2 To what extent have you found these aims to have been realized? [End Page 13]
I was a founding member and went to the first conference. A professor of mine had been a student of Paul Korshin at Penn, who was the first Executive Secretary. Paul encouraged me to join, and he often asked my advice in the first years. I got to know him when the Society was really only about ten people—the founders that met in hotel rooms in various cities. Besides the fact that one of his students introduced us, I had a fellowship at the BL one summer when he was there, and we often sat together, had coffee, and once in a while he invited me to join a group going somewhere like Windsor Castle. So we had a lot of time to talk about growing the society. His questions and my answers were really brainstorming about how to let graduate students and young faculty in many disciplines know about the Society and then motivate them to join it. Paul had a huge influence on what the Society is today in his dedicated attempts to reach into small disciplines that we didn't know many people in (many foreign languages, including non-European; both art history and connoisseurship; music history, performance, and even instrument making).
His greatest influence came from the immense amount of energy he invested in recruiting women members, and I gave him a lot of advice on that. He even got a grant to have an independent scholar in the field go through the Directory of American Scholars and identify women in eighteenth-century studies (note this gave us a big bank of disciplines). And he wrote them; I wrote some of those letters, too, and from the very beginning, ASECS had the highest percentage of women members of any of the learned societies and associations. I believe that was recognized when we became a member of the American Philosophical Society, a huge achievement. Paul also asked me to help identify women who should be invited to form panels and sessions and who were "good enough" to be plenaries. Although I considered it insulting even then that the board needed suggestions for "deserving" women plenaries, at least the board wanted them or knew they needed them.
I was a very interdisciplinary graduate student, and I did find the society to be what this description says. Back then it was brave to be interdisciplinary, and the original board members sometimes had to articulate their stance. I came to graduate school with an unusually well-developed interdisciplinary background. Perhaps the basic reasons are amusing. First, I changed my major five times and still graduated with an undergraduate degree in three years and a summer. As I passed through these majors, some of my favorite courses were chemistry, two semesters of kinesiology, a seminar in British drama, 1885–1930 (Somerset Maugham...
