Samuel Moyn


Samuel Aaron Moyn is the Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University, previously the Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School and Professor of History at Yale University, which he joined in July 2017. He was a professor of history at Columbia University for thirteen years and a professor of history and of law at Harvard University for three years. His research interests are in modern European intellectual history, with special interests in France and Germany, political and legal thought, historical and critical theory, and Jewish studies.
He has been co-director of the New York-area Consortium for Intellectual and Cultural History, is editor of the journal Humanity, and has editorial positions at several other publications.

Academic career

After attending University City High School in St. Louis, Missouri, Moyn earned his A.B. degree from Washington University in St. Louis in history and French literature. He continued his education, earning a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and his J.D. from Harvard Law School.
In 2007, Moyn received Columbia University's annual Mark Van Doren Award for outstanding undergraduate teaching, determined by undergraduates, and its Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award for "unusual merit across a range of professorial activities". In 2008, he won a Guggenheim Fellowship, and is currently a Berggruen Fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard.
He is also a fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

Personal life

Samuel Moyn is Jewish. He is married.

Publications

Books

  • '
  • A Holocaust Controversy: The Treblinka Affair in Postwar France
  • Pierre Rosanvallon, Democracy Past and Future
  • The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History
  • '
  • Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World
  • Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War
  • ''Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times''

    Selected articles

  • "Imperial Graveyard", London Review of Books, vol. 42, no. 3, pp. 23–25. Moyn concludes his review, on p. 25: " Our Man may be the most vivid tour of America's foreign delusions that has been offered since the Vietnam War."
  • , American Affairs Journal Vol. IV, Spring 2020 pp. 149–160.
  • , The New York Review of Books, September 1, 2021.