Jewish StudiesProgram

Biography:

Dr. Silverman's fields of specialization include French society, culture and politics, 1870-1914, the Dreyfus Affair, Art Nouveau, history of the book/print culture studies and France and the Holocaust. She is the author of The Notorious Life of Gyp: Right-Wing Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle France (Oxford UP, 1995 and in French translation: Gyp, La dernière des Mirabeau, with a preface by Michel Winock [Plon-Perrin, 1998]); The New Bibliopolis: French Book Collectors and the Culture of Print, 1880-1914 (U of Toronto P, 2008), which received the 2009 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies, awarded by the Modern Language Association; and Henri Vever, champion de l'Art nouveau (Armand Colin, 2018), which was the subject of a 2018 symposium at the Musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris. She has published articles in Book History, Dix-Neuf, Contemporary French Civilization, Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, Nineteenth-Century French Studies and Quaerendo. In 2017 Dr. Silverman was a Visiting Fellow at the Van Gogh Museum, where she led a seminar entitled "Life and Art in Belle Époque Paris: Collectors, Decorative Arts, Esthetics." She is currently working on a book about Franco-American culinary exchanges from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. She regularly takes groups of students to Paris to deepen their understanding of France's experience of the Holocaust (https://news.psu.edu/story/566332/2019/04/01/academics/students-meet-holocaust-survivors-embedded-course-trip-france).