Alice Kaplan

Biography

Alice Kaplan, John M. Musser Professor of French, is a specialist of 20th century France.  She works at the intersection of literature and history, using a method that allies archival research with textual analysis.  Her teaching and research have focused on the Second World War, the Liberation, and the Algerian War, and on the writers Céline, Proust, and Camus.   Recent courses include: The Modern French Novel (with Professor Samuels), Very Contemporary Fiction (with Professor Cadieu), WWII in French Cinema, The Archives: Fact and Fiction, One Hundred Years of Swann’s Way, and Camus: Politics and Passion in Postwar France.  A literary translator, Kaplan serves on the newly created advisory board of the National Book Foundation’s study of the state of translation in the United States.  She is a former Guggenheim Fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a recipient of the French Légion d’Honneur as well the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History (for The Collaborator) and the Henry Adams Prize (for The Interpreter).

Publication Highlights

Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature and French Intellectual Life. (1986)Sources et citations dans Céline,  ‘Bagatelles pour un massacre’ ( 1997)

French Lessons: A Memoir (1993)

The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach (2000)

The Interpreter (2005)

Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis (2012)

Looking for The Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic (forthcoming, fall 2016)