People
Sarah Maza
18th-20th century France
Office: Harris Hall #304
Phone: 847-491-3460
E-mail: scm
northwestern.edu
Sarah Maza (PhD Princeton, 1978), Jane Long Professor in the Arts and Sciences, specializes in the history of France from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century, with a focus on social, cultural and intellectual history. Most of her work concerns “the social imaginary,” the ways in which people in the past have understood, experienced and represented social identities, particularly class identities. She has published Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-Century France: The Uses of Loyalty (Princeton University Press, 1983), Private Lives and Public Affairs: the Causes Célèbres of Pre-Revolutionary France (University of California Press, 1993), which won the David Pinkney Prize of the Society for French Historical Studies, The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary, 1750-1850 (Harvard University Press, 2003) winner of the George Mosse Prize of the American Historical Association, and Violette Nozière: A Story of Murder in 1930s Paris (University of California Press, 2011). She also works on issues of theory and methodology, has published articles on cultural history, history and literature, and interdisciplinarity, and coedited the Blackwell Companion to Western Historical Thought (2002). Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Woodrow Wilson Center, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and she is a past president of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. She currently directs Northwestern’s Chabraja Center for Historical Studies.
