Alice Yaeger Kaplan (born June 22, 1954) is an American scholar of French literature. She is the Sterling Professor of French at Yale University and has written extensively on 20th-century French literature, history, and intellectual life.
Alice Kaplan was born on June 22, 1954 in Minneapolis, the youngest of three children. Her father, Sidney J. Kaplan, an attorney who had served as a prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crime trials, died when she was seven. She attended the Northrop Collegiate School, now The Blake School. When she was fifteen, her mother, Leonore Kaplan, a social worker and an enthusiastic Francophile, sent her to Le Collège du Léman in Versoix, Switzerland for a year to learn French. She attended Vassar College and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California at Berkeley, with a major in French and a junior year abroad in Bordeaux. She completed her Ph.D. in French with a minor in philosophy at Yale University in 1981.
Kaplan served as an assistant professor at North Carolina State University and at Columbia University before becoming the Gilbert, Louis and Edward Lehrman Professor of Romance Studies and Professor of Literature and History at Duke University and founding director of the Center for French and Francophone Studies there. She joined the Yale faculty in 2008 and was named the John M. Musser Professor of French. She has served as the Chair of the Department of French, the Director of the Whitney Humanities Center, and the Director of the Yale Translation Initiative at the MacMillan Center, which she founded together with Harold Augenbraum in 2018. In 2019, she was named Sterling Professor of French.
Kaplan's research interests include autobiography and memory, translation in theory and practice, literature and the law, twentieth-century French literature, French cultural studies, and post-war French culture. Her undergraduate and graduate teaching includes courses on Camus; War and Memory; Fiction in the Archive; existentialist thought and literature; French cinema of the Occupation; and a lecture course on the modern French novel (co-taught with Maurice Samuels).
Kaplan's memoir, French Lessons (1993), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography/autobiography and was named a New York Times Notable Book. Her book The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach (2000) received the Los Angeles Times Book Award in History, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction and the National Book Award, which praised the book as the "definitive account of Brasillach's crime and punishment." It was also listed as a New York Times Notable Book and an American Library Association Notable Book of the Year. The Interpreter (2005) received the Henry Adams Prize from the Society for History in the Federal Government. Looking for The Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic (2016) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, the prix Médicis essai, and the Grand Prix des lectrices de Elle. It was also included on the New York Times list of 100 Notable Books of 2017 and received the Gustav Ranis International Book Prize from Yale's MacMillan Center. Her 2024 book Baya ou le grand vernissage received an honorable mention from Prix Littéraire Fetkann! Maryse Condé. In 2025, she received Le Prix special de for her collective oeuvre.
Kaplan is a former Guggenheim Fellow (1994), a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2009), and a recipient of the French Legion of Honour (2013). In 2001, she was appointed an Officer in the Ordre des Palmes Académiques by the French Ministry of Education. She is a trustee of the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, and has held fellowships from the Stanford Humanities Center and the National Humanities Center.
Kaplan is an active public intellectual and has contributed to publications such as the New York Review of Books, The Nation, and The Paris Review. She has participated in numerous interviews and lectured in the U.S., France, and Algeria, often discussing topics like translation, memory, and French-Algerian history.
She has served as a judge for several literary prizes, including the National Book Award, the American Library in Paris Book Award, and currently services the French Voices Translation jury of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York (now Albertine Foundation). She was a member of the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary from 1997 until 2018, when the panel stopped its activity.
Kaplan is a founding member of the MaisonDAR collective, a pluridisciplinary space dedicated to fostering reflection, creation and practice among artists and researchers in Algiers. She participated with the other members of that group in the "Champs des Possibles" project, which offered workshops and internships in cinema, photography, and literature. Her book group, "Lioum Adab," began in 2022 as part of that project, and has continued beyond.