Product Code Database
Sarah Maza is a historian of early modern and Modernism France who specializes in social, political, and cultural history. She taught history at Northwestern University before retiring with Emeritus status in 2024.
Maza began her career at Northwestern University as a professor in 1978. She served as chair of the department from 2001-2004 and 2008-2009 and an associate chair from 2016-2017 and 2020-2021. In 2024, she retired with professor emerita status.
In 1993, Maza published Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France about popular political scandals and crimes in the Kingdom of France in the 18th century, including the prosecution and exoneration of Marie Salmon, the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, and the institutionalization of the Comte de Sanois. She explores how 18th-century defense lawyers in these high-profile cases — or causes célèbres — addressed the public directly via widely-circulated mémoires judiciaires () written in a dramatic literary style that compared "virtuous commoners" with "corrupt aristocrats" of the ancien régime. In addition to defending their clients, Maza argues that these lawyers, through their published mémoires, were "raising pointed questions about social reform" while also inviting the public to criticize and weigh circumstances of these cases themselves. Maza's analysis is influenced by Habermas' research into the emergence of the public sphere in the 18th century, and Private Lives and Public Affairs is cited as an example of "new cultural history."
The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary, 1750-1850 (2003) is considered one of Maza's more controversial works. Central to her thesis is the idea that "identity is through the stories people tell about themselves" and that the act of naming, in particular, is powerful. To that end, she notes that no group ever called themselves italics=unset, and, instead, people deployed the label against others to denigrate them. Furthermore, she argues that the italics=unset as a unified class is a myth created, in part, by modern historians.
In Violette Nozière: A Story of Murder in 1930s Paris (2011), Maza shares a case from the interwar period of France about an 18-year old girl named Violette Nozière, who was accused of murdering her father and attempting to kill her mother. Maza explores how and why Nozière's case became a "national obsession" in France. Vogue described the book as "grittily cinematic." Judith Warner wrote in her New York Times review that Maza provides a "richly layered cultural history" and "skillfully analyzes Violette’s transformation from wretched schoolgirl to cultural icon"
|
|
