Vote for ME! (Subject to Terms and Conditions)

Yes.  I am now officially registered as candidate for the Executive Committee of the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

And this photo represents my attempt to look serious and resolute.  I want to exude “trust” and “competence” and yet still exude a faint sense of melancholy and vulnerability.  The voters, I sense, want someone who can sit on a committee and discuss the arrangement of bursaries and the planning of conferences and seminars with requisite passion and commitment but not someone who will be driven to hubristic excess by these powers.

The vote isn’t till next year but the campaign starts NOW.

Mine will be an environmentally friendly campaign may I say, meanwhile.  Other candidates may clog up your letter box with colourful printed matter illustrating their claims and statistics, but I will keep things electronic   I think.  Which reminds me – I probably need a slogan.

No election campaign in history can rival  the staccato alliteration of

TIPPECANOE AND TYLER TOO

Unfortunately, this slogan is nineteenth century, not eighteenth century.

Also,  Martin Van Buren is not an electoral rival of mine.

Also, it has nothing to do with a committee devoted to academic scholarship.

Also, it’s really about the slaughter of Native Americans.

So, despite the fact that it sort of sounds cool – I’ve decided I can’t use it.

There’s always the upbeat vigorous assertion of modernity as a sloganeering strategy.

CONRAD BRUNSTROM

BRINGING THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY INTO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY.

But that just sounds confused and stupid.

I’m warming to the more conservative and accurate – yet faintly mysterious..

CONRAD BRUNSTROM

BECAUSE WHAT HAPPENS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY – STAYS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

That should reassure people who might think that I might abuse my powers so as to re-eighteenth century style sewage systems.  Or eighteenth-century dentistry.  So far, it’s the best I’ve come up with.  But I’m bound to come up with something better between now and the election.  Bound to.  In the meantime, all of you please vote for me.

(By “All” – I do of course mean “all of you who happen to be officially registered as a member of a constituent society of ISECS such as ECIS, ASECS, CSECS etc. etc. etc.  But then – who else would read this far down the page?)