Maria Beliaeva Solomon

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.

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 Romantisme, 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. 

She is Project Director of The Revue des Colonies: A Digital Scholarly Edition and Translation, a collaborative digital humanities endeavor aiming to provide a complete, critically annotated transcription and English translation of the entire print run of the first French periodical directed by people of color. In this capacity, she leads an international and interdisciplinary team of scholars who situate the journal’s emancipatory rhetoric within the political, material, and cultural contexts of its publication. 

Research related to the project has been published in Cahiers Alexandre Dumas, Romantisme, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Outre-Mers, and Scholarly Editing.

The project was featured in a Samedi Magazine radio interview on February 22, 2025, as part of a Black History Month episode highlighting Afrodiasporic intellectual and cultural contributions.

This work has been supported by a planning grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), as well as by the American Council of Learned Societies, the NYPL Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 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.

Most recently, she organized the international colloquium The Revue des Colonies: Diasporic Networks and the Struggle for Abolition, held simultaneously at the Archives nationales d’outre-mer (ANOM) in Aix-en-Provence and the Archives territoriales de Martinique (ATM) in Fort-de-France. This event marked the launch of the traveling exhibition The Revue des Colonies: Diaspora + Abolition, which will travel from Aix-en-Provence (February 2025) to Fort-de-France (May 2026).

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.