About

Maurice Samuels

Maurice Samuels is the Betty Jane Anlyan Professor of French at Yale University, where he also chairs the Department of French. In 2011, he became the inaugural director of the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism, one of the only academic programs in the United States dedicated to studying both historical and contemporary forms of antisemitism. 

A native of Chicago, he received his A.B. summa cum laude from Harvard in 1990, after which he spent a year studying in Paris at the École normale supérieure and writing in cafés. He then worked for three years in Hollywood, where he rejected screenplays for a living (he has been trying to repay this karmic debt ever since).  He then returned to Harvard for his Ph.D. in French, which he was awarded in 2000.  He taught for six years at the University of Pennsylvania before moving to Yale in 2006.

A specialist of the literature and culture of nineteenth-century France, he has written five books: Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair (Yale University Press, 2024), The Betrayal of the Duchess (Basic Books, 2020), The Right to Difference (University of Chicago Press, 2016), Inventing the Israelite (Stanford University Press, 2010), and The Spectacular Past (Cornell University Press, 2004). He has also edited anthologies of Jewish literature in both French and English. He is the recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and the MLA's Scaglione Prize for the best book in French studies (for both Inventing the Israelite and The Right to Difference) and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship. 

He currently lives in Branford, CT and New York, but spends part of every summer working at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.