Jerrold Seigel
Jerrold Seigel is the William R. Kenan, jr., Professor of History Emeritus at New York University, where he taught from 1988 to 2006. Before arriving at NYU he taught for twenty-five years at Princeton, where he received a Ph.D. in 1963. He grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, attended public schools, and graduated from University City High School. He received a B. A. in History and Literature magna cum laude from Harvard in 1958, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. His first field of historical specialization was the Italian Renaissance, but since the 1970s he has concentrated chiefly on more recent topics, beginning with Marx's Fate: The Shape of a Life (Princeton University Press, 1978). His next book, Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830-1930 (Viking Penguin, 1986) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award in criticism. More recently he has published The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp: Desire, Liberation, and the Self in Modern Culture (University of California Press, 1995), The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe Since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and Modernity and Bourgeois Life: Society, Politics and Culture in England, France, and Germany since 1750 (Cambridge University Press, 2012), which one the 2014 Laura Shannon Prize for "the best book in European studies that transcends a focus on any one country, state, or people to stimulate new ways of thinking about contemporary Europe as a whole." He is currently completing a manuscript called "Lives Between Cultures: Europe and its Others in Five Exemplary Careers." He has held fellowships from the Fulbright Commission, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and was twice a Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He has served as a visiting lecturer (maître d'études associé) at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, and in 2000 was a Resident at the American Academy in Rome. A devoted amateur cellist, he lives in New York City with his wife, the flutist Jayn Rosenfeld.
