Maurice Samuels

Maurice Samuels's picture
Betty Jane Anlyan Professor of French
Rm 324, 82-90 Wall St, New Haven, CT 06511-6605
(203) 432-5046

Bio

Maurice Samuels specializes in the literature and culture of nineteenth-century France and in Jewish Studies.  He is the author of three books. The Spectacular Past:  Popular History and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France (Cornell, 2004), examines new forms of historical representation—including panoramas, boulevard theater, and the novel—in post-Revolutionary France.  It won the Gaddis Smith International Book Prize given by Yale’s MacMillan Center. Inventing the Israelite:  Jewish Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford, 2010), brings to light the first Jewish fiction writers in French.   It won the Scaglione Prize, given by the Modern Language Association for the best book in French studies, and was translated into French (Hermann, 2017).The Right to Difference:  French Universalism and the Jews (Chicago, 2016) studies the way French writers and thinkers have conceived of the place of Jews within the nation from the French Revolution to the present.  It also won the MLA’s Scaglione Prize for the best book in French Studies.  He co-edited a Nineteenth-Century Jewish Literature Reader (Stanford, 2013) and edited Les grands auteurs de la littérature juive au XIXe siècle (Éditions Hermann, 2015). His current project, a study of the arrest of the Duchesse de Berry and modern France’s first antisemitic affair, is under contract with Basic Books.  He has published articles on diverse topics, including romanticism and realism, aesthetic theory, representations of the Crimean War, boulevard culture, and writers from Balzac to Zola.  Since 2011, he has directed the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism.

Education

A.B., Harvard, 1990, summa cum laude
A.M., Harvard, 1995
Ph.D., Harvard, 2000