This summer ASAP will run its annual election to fill positions on its Executive Committee. There are two positions up for election: Second Vice President and Member at Large. The candidates’ biographies and nomination statements appear below.
SECOND VICE PRESIDENT CANDIDATES
Amber Jamilla Musser is Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research focuses on sensation and the intersections of race, sexuality, and aesthetics. Along with Kadji Amin and Roy Pérez, she co-edited Queer Form, a sspecial issue of ASAP Journal. She is the author of Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (NYU Press, 2014) and Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (NYU Press, 2018).
Statement:
I have been attending ASAP conferences since 2017 –first on panels on brown and black aesthetics of femininity and refusal and later through a seminar on opacity and racial performance. I have admired the ways that the conferences have been able to foster ASAP’s twin commitments to contemporary art in all of its forms and interdisciplinarity through both the panel and seminar form. ASAP conferences are unique in that they give scholars and artists the opportunity to investigate similar theoretical concerns across a variety of media. I am committed to maintaining and expanding this interdisciplinarity, especially since I see it as pivotal to amplifying the different dimensions through which difference is apprehended. In this way I see the ASAP conference as central to conversations about race, gender, queerness, and aesthetics.
Min Hyoung Song is Professor of English at Boston College, where he is the director of the Asian American Studies Program and a member of the Environmental Studies steering committee. He is the author of the forthcoming book Climate Lyricism (Duke; January 2022) and two other monographs, co-editor of several volumes, and general co-editor of the four-volume Cambridge series Asian American Literature in Transition. He is also the author of many journal articles and book chapters, as well as of essays in public-facing venues like The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, and The Chicago Review of Books.
Statement:
It’s an honor to be running for the second vice president position of ASAP. The organization has been for me a special community of scholars who takes seriously the importance of aesthetics as a subject of intense inquiry. It provides space for creativity, fierce debate, and even whimsy, and I wish to do my part to keep this space as vital as possible. Three areas of special interest to me is, first, to keep ASAP international in its orientation. The very first meeting of the association I attended was a symposium in London in 2012, which cemented for me the importance of being international. Second, I’ve witnessed a growing ethnic and racial diversity, and I know that such diversity does not just happen but has to be fostered. This kind of work is something I am committed to. Finally, I want to keep finding more ways to support graduate students and non-tenure track faculty at a time of continued danger for the university. The pandemic in particular seems to have accelerated already ongoing trends toward greater adjunctification, movement of resources away from the humanities, and school closures. A learned society like ASAP can play an important role in countering such trends.
MEMBER AT LARGE CANDIDATES
Summer Kim Lee is Assistant Professor of English at UCLA. She earned her Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University and is a former Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Dartmouth College’s Department of English. Her research and teaching focus on feminist and queer theory, critical race and ethnic studies, performance studies, visual culture, and Asian American literature and culture. She co-edited a special issue of Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory titled, “Performances of Contingency: Feminist Relationality and Asian American Studies After the Institution.” She is currently working on her first monograph, which turns to the discursive, social, cultural production of the figure of the student in Asian Americanist critique and feminist and queer theory. Some of her published and forthcoming work can be found in Social Text, ASAP/Journal, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, GLQ, Journal of Popular Music Studies, and Post45.
Statement:
I am honored and excited to be nominated to serve on the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present’s Motherboard as Member-At-Large representative. Since attending my first ASAP conference in 2018 in New Orleans, the organization has become central to my academic community, as a hub for interdisciplinary scholars contributing to academic discourse on contemporary aesthetics, artistic practice, and cultural production. ASAP has given me the opportunity to meet scholars and practitioners who have become mentors, friends, and collaborators. It is for this reason that I am committed to the organization and its support of rigorous, expansive, and experimental thought that takes seriously an attunement to the minoritarian — to a peripheral, alternative position to dominant public cultures and the critical, social, and political possibilities it affords. If elected, I look forward to helping the organization expand its draw through the fields it engages, foster more work that focuses on the global arts in the contemporary moment, and bring in more scholars and artists of color to further enliven the organization. I am dedicated to an involvement with ASAP, and am eager to be of service to members’ needs. The cancelation of last year’s ASAP made clear to me how much I value the interactions, conversations, and panels at ASAP that I greatly missed. I am eager for us to meet again and to continue being a part of ASAP.
Sheila Liming is an associate professor at Champlain College (Burlington, VT), where she teaches a mix of classes in literature, writing, media studies, and publishing. She is the author of two books, What a Library Means to a Woman (Minnesota UP, 2020) and Office (Bloomsbury, 2020). In her writing and research, she focuses on applying materialist critique to a broad swathe of American cultural and literary texts: her scholarship and reviews have appeared in journals like Criticism, ASAP/J, JML: Journal of Modern Literature, and American Literary History, while her essays and creative nonfiction have appeared in venues like The Atlantic, Lapham’s Quarterly, The Los Angeles Review of Books, McSweeney’s and The Chronicle Review.
Statement:
My involvement with ASAP stretches all the way back to ASAP/3 in 2011 when, as a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University, I served as support staff for the conference. I was immediately taken with the organization’s scope and daring and, in particular, with the way that it pairs on-the-ground discussions of artistic practice with invested criticism and analysis. Since then, I’ve come to see ASAP as an ideal venue for piloting some of my own boldest and most adventurous critical projects. In joining the ASAP Motherboard, my primary aim would be to help field comments, concerns, and recommendations from organization members—especially from graduate students, contingent / non-tenure track scholars, arts practitioners, and others representing non-dominant facets of the academic labor spectrum. I would seek to use these recommendations and comments to launch new initiatives on behalf of the organization that help to highlight and advocate for these particular sectors of its membership.
More information about the election is forthcoming from our membership listserv, asapartsnow@gmail.com. If you’d like to join the listserv, send a quick note saying so to the address.