TAYLOR, Anne-Marie 1964-

PERSONAL:

Born April 24, 1964, in New York, NY; daughter of Robert Edward (a professor of French) and Olga (a homemaker; maiden name, Zazuliak) Taylor. Education: University of Massachusetts—Amherst, B.A. (summa cum laude), 1986, M.A. (French), 1989, M.A. (history), 1993, Ph.D. (with distinction), 1999. Hobbies and other interests: Piano, drawing.

ADDRESSES:

Office—c/o Department of French, University of Massachusetts—Amherst, Amherst, MA 01003.

CAREER:

Substitute high school teacher, Amherst, MA, 1987; Université de Bordeaux III, Bordeaux, France, lectrice, 1989-90; Université François Rabelais, Tours, France, lectrice, 2990-91; Greenfield Community College, adjunct instructor in French, 2002; University of Massachusetts—Amherst, Amherst, MA, lecturer in French, 2002—. Mount Holyoke College, visiting assistant professor, 2001—.

MEMBER:

American Historical Association, Organization of American Historians, Modern Language Association of America, Massachusetts Historical Society (member of library), Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Kappa Phi.

WRITINGS:

Young Charles Sumner and the Legacy of the American Enlightenment, 1811-1851, University of Massachusetts Press (Amherst, MA), 2001.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

Continuing research on Charles Sumner; research on early Gothic architecture.

SIDELIGHTS:

Anne-Marie Taylor told CA: "I like to consider myself a student of human nature. I am fascinated by why people feel and act as they do, what motivates them, what inspires them, what holds them back, and how they confront it. Thus I love biography—not the kind of biography that tells merely what and when, but the kind that seeks to understand life from its subject's point of view. I want to live the subject's life with him between the covers of the book and, by extension, during the research toward anything I write.

"In writing Young Charles Sumner and the Legacy of the American Enlightenment, 1811-1851, I was urged on also by a deep sense of the wrong committed by scholars when they write biographies rooted in the trends of the moment, or in the received opinions of their own time. The experiences and accomplishments of a person's life may have lessons or consequences for other times, but they happen in the framework of that person's own life and time. As a nationally recognized advocate against slavery, Sumner was glorified or vilified by others according to their political opinions, and so he has been ever since—his own humanity, his own personal story being largely forgotten in the ongoing controversy over slavery and race. Whenever this is done in biography, the essential and universal truths of human nature are overlooked as well.

"My background, after all, was in literature before history. I cannot accept the twentieth-century fashion of trying to turn history into a science; it is the story of men's lives, of their minds and hearts, and to me that makes it clearly one of the humanities. And though some biographies have influenced me, such as David Cecil's deeply insightful and moving Melbourne, I find my principal inspiration in literature, in the painful humanity of a François Villon or the humanistic and artistic élan of a Victor Hugo. My background was also in France before the United States, through both my French studies and a lifelong tie to France and French culture, and so it seems impossible to me to see one country's history, whether artistic or political, in isolation."