Maurice Samuels

Betty Jane Anlyan Professor of French, on leave spring 13

maurice.samuels@yale.edu
203-432-5046
82-90 Wall Street, Room 322

A.B., Harvard, 1990, summa cum laude

A.M., Harvard, 1995

Ph.D., Harvard, 2000

Before arriving at Yale in 2006, Maurice Samuels taught at the University of Pennsylvania.  He specializes in the literature and culture of nineteenth-century France and in Jewish Studies.  His first book, The Spectacular Past:  Popular History and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France (Cornell UP, 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.  His second book, Inventing the Israelite:  Jewish Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford UP, 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.  He is currently co-editing a Nineteenth-Century Jewish Literature Reader and working on a new book on the relationship of antisemitism and philosemitism in France, from the French Revolution to the present.  He has also published articles on diverse topics, including romanticism and realism, aesthetic theory, representations of the Crimean War, and boulevard culture. 

Professor Samuels is the Director of the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism (YPSA).

Recent undergraduate courses include:  “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century;” “Money and the Novel;” “Jewish Identity and French Culture;” and “Representing the Holocaust” (co-taught with Millicent Marcus).  Recent graduate courses include:  “Realism and Naturalism;” “Fin-de-siècle France;” and “Modernity.”