Maurice Samuels specializes in the literature and culture of nineteenth-century France, Jewish Studies, and the history of antisemitism. He is broadly interested in investigating the origins of our cultural modernity, tracing how new forms of subjectivity—and new ideas about history, politics, race, and the novel—took shape in the period following the French Revolution. His books on Jewish themes include: Inventing the Israelite: Jewish Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford, 2010), which brings to light the first Jewish fiction writers in French in the mid-nineteenth century; The Right to Difference: French Universalism and the Jews (Chicago, 2016) which studies the way French writers and thinkers have conceived of the place of Jews within the nation from the French Revolution to the present; The Betrayal of the Duchess (Basic, 2020) which resurrects a forgotten historical scandal that led to modern France’s first antisemitic affair; and most recently, a biography of Alfred Dreyfus, which was published in the Jewish Lives series (Yale University Press, 2024). He also co-edited a Nineteenth-Century Jewish Literature Reader (Stanford, 2013) and edited Les grands auteurs de la littérature juive au XIXe siècle (Hermann, 2015). A recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and of the New York Public Library Cullman Center Fellowship, he served as chair of Yale’s Judaic Studies Program and has directed the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism since 2011.
