Research Expertise and Interest

French, early modern French literary, political history, the enlightenment, human rights

Research Description

Susan Maslan is an associate professor in the Department of French. Her scholarly work is situated at the crossroads of early modern French literary, political, and social history. She writes and teaches about seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theater, the French Revolution, the Enlightenment, and human rights.

She is currently completing on a book-length project called “Citizen/Human: The Literary Genealogy of Human Rights in France, 1640-1795” that explores how literary, economic, and political works constructed figures of the human, the citizen, and the shifting relation between the two. She is also especially interested in the discerning the literary presence of those who are often elided from literary and political representation: the poor.  She is interested in a constellation of problems centering on biopolitics and servitude. 

In another book project tentatively entitled Judaism and Israelites in Early Modern French Literature, she pursues her interests in the relation between French literature and the Hebrew Bible in figures such as Racine, Rousseau, and Voltaire.

Professor Maslan received her PhD. from the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University. She is an affiliated faculty member of the Center for Jewish Studies.