CV Information:

As a graduate student I had the opportunity to help conceptualize and organize the interdisciplinary organization Dan Williams was creating as ASECS's early-American affiliate, the Society for Eighteenth-Century American Studies; I accepted Dan's challenge to draft its original constitution. Given last year's timely merger between that group and the SEA, I now chair the SEA/ASECS liaison.comm. I also serve on the program committee for the 2002 ASECS, in Colorado Springs; on the Advisory Board for ASECS's On-Line Book Review Project; and, working closely with Jeff Richards, as associate program chair for Norfolk.

Crèvecoeur, with his questions of nationalism and cultural influence, is at the heart of my scholarly work. My More Letters (Georgia, 1995: "An Approved Edition," MLA's committee on scholarly editions) grew out of my work with the MS. the LC acquired in the late 1980s. I've received grants from NEH, JCB, Library Company of Philadelphia, Southern Regional Education Board. Currently I'm assembling an interdisciplinary collection of theoretically informed essays, The New Crèvecoeur, and continuing to work on a classroom edition of the essays he wrote in English but didn't include in Letters; my long-range interests include a study of intersections between utopia and the Golden Age.

I came to FSU from Chapel Hill (Ph.D., 1990) via a tenure-track position as Texas-El Paso's early Americanist. At FSU, I'm (elected) coordinator of my department's annual theory colloquium, advisor to our department's graduate student organization, and convenor of our U. S. Literature Discussion Group. I'm on our Program in American and Florida Studies' (elected) executive committee and on several campuswide.comms, including the faculty/student one managing distinguished lectures. In 1998 I was one of four nominees for the National Association of Graduate and Professional Students' "Friend of Graduate Students Award," and last year I received two campuswide awards at FSU, one (from the student-affairs hierarchy) for service and one that originated in undergraduates' nominations, the University Distinguished Teacher Award. I direct the Bryan Hall Learning Community (www.fsu.edu/~bryan) and am involved in a long-term, long-distance relationship, and I relish fly-fishing, traveling, birding, and stir-frying.

Vision Statement:

Help, conceptualize and organize are crucial words in the opening of the accompanying bio. In encouraging me to run, several colleagues have said my experience organizing so many panels and sessions should be especially valuable. Realizing most meaningful ideas can require a broad network of knowledgeable, resourceful people, and the SEA is just such a network. While I hardly know everyo --all of our members, I enjoy successful working relationships with a large number of early Americanists. Are all early Americanists in SEA? Nope, and all our Vision Statements will likely mention increasing membership. I applaud the success Carla Mulford, Sherry Harris, and David Shields have achieved, enlarging our organization in numbers and in breadth, bringing in scholars from various disciplines. Let's continue; let's work toward a more substantive involvement with the American Studies Association. One idea I've nurtured is the interdisciplinary colloquy with the author (Joyceans call theirs a "living book review"), and I've chaired such panels at three of the past four ASAs and at our '99 SEA conference -- and I've built one around one of our Norfolk plenary speakers, Joyce Chaplin. The southeastern 18C society is continuing the series that I began--at the Charleston ASECS ('94!), where I served as chair of SEASECS's program-within-the-program.comm.

Each of us on this ballot has proven himself a hard worker, and whatever the outcome of this vote I look forward to continuing to work well with both Dan and Tom. On that note, I must acknowledge how surreal it is, sitting here in Tallahassee in early December 2000, writing a statement that is part of an election.