Maria Beliaeva Solomon
Assistant Professor, School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies, French
Affiliate Faculty, The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Affiliate Faculty, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities
3106 Jiménez Hall
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Research Expertise
19th Century
Caribbean
Comparative Literature
French and Francophone Studies
Textual and Digital Studies
Transatlantic Studies
Maria Beliaeva Solomon received her PhD in French Literature, Thought and Culture from New York University (2019) after completing graduate work in Comparative Literature (M.A., Rutgers University, 2013). She is a specialist of nineteenth-century French and Francophone literature and media, focusing on questions of influence, translation, and circulation.
Currently a Scholar-in-Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, she will be on research leave as a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies until Spring 2024.
Her first book project considers the popularity of so-called "frenetic" literature in 1830s France in light of contemporaneous transformations in media and print culture, with special attention to sensationalized representations of racial and gendered violence. Material from this project has been published in collected volumes and peer-reviewed journals such as Revue Nerval, L'Année balzacienne, French Forum and Dix-Neuf.
Building on her work for this first book, Dr. Beliaeva Solomon’s current research seeks to outline the complex connections between modern media, racial and colonial identities, and literary traditions, both within the French empire and transnationally, highlighting the rich exchanges between French- and English-language abolitionist periodicals in the lead up to the French abolition of slavery of 1848.
Aside from the ACLS and NYPL Schomburg Center, this research has received support from the Fondation pour la Mémoire de l'Esclavage (the Foundation for the Remebrance of Slavery), the Bibliographical Society of America, the College of Arts and Humanities and the Graduate School at the University of Maryland.
She is especially interested in considering media and cultural history alongside questions of marginality and stigma, both within the nineteenth century and transhistorically, serving, in 2021, as co-organizer of an international colloquium on the Representations and Reception of French and Francophone Women Writers in the Media (19th-21st centuries).
She is an affiliate member of the Research Center for XIXth Century Studies at the Université de Paris.
