Mau­rice Samuels is the Bet­ty Jane Anlyan Pro­fes­sor of French at Yale Uni­ver­si­ty, chair of the pro­gram in Juda­ic stud­ies, and founder and direc­tor of the Yale Pro­gram for the Study of Anti­semitism. He is the author of three books, includ­ing The Spec­tac­u­lar Past, which won the Gad­dis Smith Inter­na­tion­al Book Prize, and Invent­ing the Israelite, which received the MLA’s Scaglione Prize. Pri­or to teach­ing at Yale, he was a pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia after com­plet­ing his Ph.D. at Har­vard. He received a Guggen­heim Fel­low­ship in 2015. He lives in New York and New Haven, Connecticut.