Echoes of Justice: What Some of History’s Most Infamous Trials Teach Us Today 

Maurice Samuels is the Betty Jane Anlyan Professor of French at Yale University, where he chairs the Department of French and serves as the inaugural director of the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism. A Chicago native, he graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1990, spent a year at the École normale supérieure in Paris, worked for three years in Hollywood, and returned to Harvard to earn his Ph.D. in 2000. Before joining Yale in 2006, he taught at the University of Pennsylvania. A specialist in the literature and culture of nineteenth-century France, Samuels has written five books, including Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair (2024), The Betrayal of the Duchess (2020), The Right to Difference (2016), and Inventing the Israelite. He has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, the MLA’s Scaglione Prize, and a Cullman Center Fellowship.

Judge Richard Gergel is a United States District Judge for the District of South Carolina, appointed by President Barack Obama in 2010. Born in Columbia, South Carolina, he completed both his undergraduate studies and his J.D. at Duke University before spending nearly three decades in private practice, focusing on personal injury and civil rights law. In addition to his judicial career, Gergel is an accomplished author and historian. He co-authored a history of the early Jewish community in Columbia and wrote Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard and the Awakening of President Harry S. Truman and Judge J. Waties Waring, which chronicles a pivotal 1946 South Carolina case that helped catalyze the modern American civil rights movement.