Alice Kaplan, Sterling Professor of French, is a specialist of 20th-century France. She works at the intersection of literature and history, using a method that allies archival research with textual analysis. She is also a literary translator.
Her teaching and research have focused on the Second World War, the Liberation, and the Algerian War, and on the writers Céline, Proust, and Camus. She has directed Ph.D. dissertations on Queer Theory, the Literature of WWII, Protestantism and French modernism, mid-century murder trials, and the family in inter-war French literature, both as a single director and co-directing with her colleagues Professors Cadieu, Samuels, and Jarvis.
Kaplan is a former Guggenheim Fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a recipient of the French Légion d’Honneur as well the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History (for The Collaborator) and the Henry Adams Prize (for The Interpreter).
Kaplan works in conjunction with many departments, programs, and initiatives outside the French Department. Outside Yale, she is a member of the Writers Council of the American Library in Paris, and sits on the board of the French journal Critique as its New Haven correspondent. She is currently serving as a jury member for the French Voices Book Prize, a translation subvention awarded by the cultural services of the French Embassy in New York. She is a Trustee of the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France.