Research Areas

Professor Maslan's 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.

Selected Publications

"Transformations of the Social Bond on the Revolutionary Stage: Equality, Language, Affect," Le pouvoir en procès. Opinion publique et légitimité politique des Lumières au Premier Empire (Classiques Garnier, forthcoming.)

“Comedy in the Age of Reason,” in The History of Modern French Literature, ed. Christopher Prendergast, (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

“Society and Nature in Revolutionary Rights Debates,” in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights, eds. Sophia Mcclennen and Alexandra Shultheis Moore (Routledge, 2015).

“Melancholy Racine: Benjamin’s Trauerspiel and Literary Jews,” Yale French Studies 124, eds. Hall Bjornstad and Katherine Ibbett (2014).

“Unfreedom and Political Subjectivity in Eighteenth-Century France,” in Unfreedom, eds. Tue Anderson Nexǿ and Christopher Prendergast, (Bielefeld [Germany]: Transcript Verlag, 2014.

« S’Asservir dans la théâtre de Corneille, »  Héros ou Personnage ? Le Personnel dans le théâtre de Pierre Corneille, Ed. Myriam Dufour-Maitre, (Rouen: Presses des universités de Rouen et du Havre), 2013.

“‘Gotta Serve Somebody’: Service, Autonomy, Society,” in eds. Sophia A. McClennen and Joseph R. Slaughter, Human Rights and Literary Forms, spec issue Comparative Literature Studies, v.46, no 1 (2009): 45-75.

“The Dream of the Feeling Citizen: Law and Emotion in Corneille and Montesquieu,” SubStance 109 (2006).

Revolutionary Acts: Theater, Democracy, and the French Revolution (Johns Hopkins University Press 2005, paperback edition 2015).

“The Antihuman: Man and Citizen before the Declaration of the Rights of Man,” SAQ : South Atlantic Quarterly (2004).

“Susannah at her Bath: Surveillance and Revolutionary Drama” Eighteenth-Century Studies (2001).

“La féminité juive et le problème de la représentation dramatique” Papers on 17th Century French Literature (1999).

“Resisting Representation: Theater and Democracy in Revolutionary France” Representations (1995).