Marci Shore
Areas of interest
- Phenomenology and Existentialism
- Marxism and Hegelianism
- Philosophy of dissent
- Polish-Jewish relations
- Eastern Europe in the 20th century
- History of totalitarianism
- Modernism and postmodernism
Biography
Marci Shore received her BA from Stanford University, her MA from University of Toronto, and her Ph.D from Stanford University. After completing her doctorate, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harriman Institute of Columbia University and subsequently assistant professor of history at Indiana University from 2002 to 2006. She is currently on leave from her position as Professor of History at Yale University and will begin teaching at the Munk School in the 2025-2026 academic year.
Her research focuses on the intellectual history of twentieth and twenty-first century Central and Eastern Europe. Since 2004 she has been a regular visiting fellow at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna. She is the translator of Michał Głowiński's The Black Seasons and the author of Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation's Life and Death in Marxism,1918-1968 and The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe. A new edition of her third book, The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution, was published in March 2024. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Foreign Policy, Eurozine, The Atlantic, The Yale Review, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. In 2018 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for the book project about phenomenology in East-Central Europe tentatively titled In Pursuit of Certainty Lost: Central European Encounters on the Way to Truth.
Select publications
- “With Shestov in Ukraine,” Liberties: Journal of Culture and Politics vol. 5, no 2 (winter 2025): 65-96.
- “A Conversation about Evil,” with Jurko Prochasko, Irish Pages (2024)
- “In Kyiv, we discuss philosophy, poetry and air raid siren protocol,” co-authored with Amelia M. Glaser, CNN (29 March 2024)
- “Invisible Bridges: On Ukraine, Russia, and friendships.” Yale Review (1 September 2022)
- “Germany Has Confronted Its Past. Now It Must Confront the Present.” Foreign Policy (8 August 2022)
- “Writing Off Russia: Volodymyr Rafeyenko interviewed by Marci Shore,” Project Syndicate (1 July 2022)
- “This is What Evil Looks Like: Towards a Phenomenology of Evil in Postmodern Form,” Social Research (winter 2021/2022)
- “On the Uses and Disadvantages of Historical Comparisons for Life,” Public Seminar and Eurozine (October 2020)
- “A Pre-History of Post-Truth, East and West,” Eurozine (September 2017)
- “The Bard of Eastern Ukraine, Where Things are Falling Apart,” The New Yorker (November 2016)
Awards & recognition
Professor Shore has won multiple awards for her writing and teaching, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018. Her book, Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation's Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968, won eight awards and was shortlisted for several more, including:
- Sidonie Miskimin Clauss Prize for Teaching Excellence in the Humanities (2023)
- Winner, 2006 National Jewish Book Award in Eastern European Studies given by the Jewish Book Council.[7]
- Winner, 2007 Oskar Halecki Polish/East Central European History Award given by the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America.
- Co-winner, 2007 American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies/Orbis Books Prize for Polish Studies.[8]
- Finalist for the Koret International Jewish Book Award in Jewish Thought.[9]