Prof. Dr. Donald Sassoon

Professor Dr. Donald Sassoon (Queen Mary University of London) held a lecture on "The Provincialism of Dominant Literature: The British and the French in the 19th Century" in ZHG 004, Göttingen on January 21, 2010.

Professor Donald Sassoon was born in Cairo and was educated in Paris, Milan, London and the United States. He has lectured at universities throughout Europe, Asia, Australia and North America, spoken at conferences in thirty countries and is frequently interviewed by the international media.

In 1999 he was Visiting Professor at the University of Trento, Italy. In 2000 he was a Senior Research Fellow at the Remarque Institute at New York University and during 2002 he was Senior Research Fellow at the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme in Paris. In the Fall of 2009 was the Samuel Wood Brooks Visiting Fellow in English Literature at the University of Queensland.


Publications

His much praised Mona Lisa: The History of the World's Most Famous Painting (Harper Collins 2001, US edition Becoming Mona Lisa, Harcourt) has been published in translation in Italy, Spain, Korea, Brazil, Finland, China, Taiwan, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Sweden. In this book Donald Sassoon describes not only the Mona Lisa and its history, but its mythology, and the processes which combined to raise it to its current level of fame.

The book, The Culture of the Europeans, was published in 2006 to wide acclaim: ‘unique and encyclopedic…a monument to streetwise and cosmopolitan scholarship’ (Eric Hobsbawm); ‘geographically ambitious…and only someone as cosmopolitan as Sassoon could have undertaken it’ (History Today). In 2009 the book was awarded the Premio Alassio Internazionale.

At the end of 2007 hisMussolini and the Rise of Fascism – a study of the circumstances leading to Mussolini’s appointment as Prime Minister in October 1922 – was published by Harper Press.