Professor Vicki Caron

Professional Background

Professor Vicki Caron received a Ph.D., an M.Phil., and an M.A. from the Department of History at Columbia University, and a B.A. from the University of Illinois. During her fellowship at the Museum, she was the Diann G. and Thomas A. Mann Professor of Modern Jewish Studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where she taught in the History Department and the Jewish Studies Program. For her J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Senior Scholar-in-Residence Fellowship, Professor Caron conducted research for her book project “Jewish Catholic Relations since 1870.”

Professor Caron has received numerous fellowships and appointments for her work in modern Jewish history and her commitment to teaching. She has received fellowships from, among others, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation; the National Endowment for the Humanities; the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies; the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture; the Fulbright Foundation; and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. In addition to lecturing widely, Professor Caron has published extensively. She is the author of dozens of scholarly articles and monographs including Uneasy Asylum, France and the Jewish Refugee Crisis, 1933-1942 (Stanford University Press, 1999), which won the 1997 Fraenkel Prize for the best unpublished manuscript in contemporary history from the Wiener Library in London, and Between France and Germany: The Jews of Alsace-Lorraine, 1871-1918 (Stanford University Press, 1988). In both books she explored modern French Jewish life, drawing extensively from French and American archival sources. Professor Caron is co-editor, with Michael Brenner and Uri Kaufmann, of Jewish Emancipation Reconsidered: The French German Models (Mohr Siebeck, 2003).

Fellowship Research

While in residence at the Center, Professor Caron conducted research for her book project “Jewish-Catholic Relations in France since 1870.” Her work provided an in-depth analysis of the deep and complex history of Catholic-Jewish relations beginning with the creation of the Third Republic. In addition to her research, Professor Caron also participated in a number of the Center’s scholarly programs and led a month-long seminar in April 2005 entitled “A History of Jewish-Catholic Relations in Modern France.”

Professor Caron was in residence at the Mandel Center from September 1, 2004 to May 31, 2005.