Marci Shore


Marci Shore is an American professor of intellectual history at the University of Toronto, where she specializes in the history of literary and political engagement with Marxism and phenomenology.
Shore is the author of Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation's Life and Death in Marxism, 1918–1968, a milieu biography of Polish and Polish-Jewish writers drawn to Marxism in the twentieth century; and of The Taste of Ashes, a study of the presence of the communist and Nazi past in today's Eastern Europe. She translated Michał Głowiński's Holocaust memoir, The Black Seasons.

Early life and education

Shore was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in 1972. She is a 1990 graduate of William Allen High School in Allentown. She then attended Stanford University, receiving a B.A. in 1994. Two years later, in 1996, she received an M.A. from the University of Toronto. She received a doctorate from Stanford University in 2001.

Career

Shore was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, an assistant professor of history and Jewish studies at Indiana University; and the Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Visiting Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies at Yale University. She has twice been a fellow of the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna. Until March 2025, Shore taught European cultural and intellectual history at Yale.
In March 2025, shortly after the 2024 [United States presidential election], Shore and her husband, Timothy Snyder, left their positions at Yale and another Yale faculty member, Jason Stanley, also departed, drawing national media attention during political criticism of universities. The three academics published a video op-ed, "We Study Fascism, and We're Leaving the US", in The [New York Times], explaining their decision to leave the United States. The professors later took positions at the Munk School of Global Affairs of the University of Toronto.

Awards

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. These include the following:

Books

  • Translator, Michał Głowiński's The Black Seasons
  • Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation's Life and Death in Marxism, 1918–1968
  • The Taste of Ashes
  • ''The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution''

    Articles

  • "Czysto Babski: A Women's Friendship in a Man's Revolution". East European Politics and Societies, Aug. 1, 2002
  • "Engineering in the Age of Innocence: A Genealogy of Discourse Inside the Czechoslovak Writer's Union, 1949–1967". East European Politics and Societies, September 1998, Vol. 12 Issue 3
  • "Children of the Revolution: Communism, Zionism, and the Berman Brothers", Jewish Social Studies. Spring 2004, Vol. 10 Issue 3
  • "Conversing with Ghosts: Jedwabne, Zydokomuna, and Totalitarianism", Kritika: Explorations of Russian and Eurasian History, June 2005, Vol. 6 Issue 2
  • "Tevye's Daughters: Jews and European Modernity", Contemporary European History. February 2007, Vol. 16 Issue 1
  • "When God Died: Symptoms of the East European Avant-Garde—and of Slavoj Žižek". Slovo a smysl/Word and Sense: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Theory and Criticism in Czech Studies, 2005
  • "Man liess sie nicht mal ein paar Worte sagen". Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, December 2001
  • "Za dużo kompromisów. Stop". Gazeta Wyborcza, July 11, 2009
  • “ Communism as a Generational History: Some Thoughts on Czechoslovakia and Poland”. Contemporary European History 18, no. 3
  • "A Pre-History of Post-Truth, East and West". Eurozine and Public Seminar Sept. 1 2017
  • "On the Uses and Disadvantages of Historical Comparisons for Life". Public Seminar Oct. 19, 2020

    Personal life

Shore married Timothy D. Snyder, a professor of history now at the University of Toronto, in 2005. They have two children.