to French professor Maurice Samuels
Maurice Samuels, professor of French, has been awarded the Gaddis Smith International Book Prize by the MacMillan Center for his book "The Spectacular Past: Popular History and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France" (Cornell University Press, 2004).
Established in spring 2005, the prize is awarded each year for the best first book by a member of the Yale ladder faculty; recipients receive a research appointment at the MacMillan Center and a $10,000 research award over two years. The award is named in honor of Gaddis Smith, the Larned Professor Emeritus of History, a former director of the MacMillan Center.
In "The Spectacular Past," Samuels examines the realm of an emerging bourgeois culture of spectacle -- including wax museums, phantasmagoria shows, historical panoramas, Romantic historical writing and dramas about Napoleon -- in order to understand new forms of historical representation in post-revolutionary France. He argues that the rise of a "spectacular historical consciousness" was not coincidental or gratuitous, but drew upon new markets, technologies, artistic and aesthetic forms, and sprang from a desire to ground revolutionary and post-revolutionary identities in a stable vision of the past that would justify the rise of a new class and political regime.
Previous Gaddis Smith International Book Prize winners were Julia Adams for "The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe" and Mridu Rai for "Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam, Rights, and the History of Kashmir."
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