Maurice Samuels
Literature and culture of nineteenth-century France and in Jewish Studies
Maurice Samuels is the Betty Jane Anlyan Professor of French, specializing in the literature and culture of nineteenth-century France and in Jewish Studies. 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. He co-edited a Nineteenth-Century Jewish Literature Reader (Stanford UP, 2013) and edited Les grands auteurs de la littérature juive au XIXe siècle (Éditions Hermann, 2015). 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. He also directs the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism.