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Tel: 310.825.4173 / E-mail

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Professor Robert M. Maniquis was born in New Jersey and educated at Rutgers University and Columbia University, where he received his Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature. He specializes in literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He has written or edited books and articles in English, French, and German. Among his publications, authored and edited, are Personal and Public Visions: Thomas De Quincey, the English Opium-Eater (1976)); English Romanticism and The French Revolution. A Special Issue of Studies in Romanticism, (1989); The Encyclopédie and the Age of Revolution: Essays and a Catalog, [with Clorinda Donato](1992); Les Révolutions dans le monde ibérique (1766-1834) : soulèvement national et révolution libérale, état des questions (with Oscar Marti and Joseph Perez), (1990); British Radical Culture of the 1790s (Huntington Library Press, 2000), Essays on Thomas De Quincey (A Special Issue of Studies in Romanticism , 2002). He is currently working on a book entitled Blood Upon the Flowers: Violence and Sacrifice in Romantic Culture. Professor Maniquis is also a contributor to the distinguished French journal Critique.

He has been the recipient of research fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the American Association of University Professors, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has conducted university seminars in Germany and France, and given lectures in those countries as well as in England and Italy. From 1989-90, he was Director of The French Revolution: A UCLA Bicentennial Program, the largest program of its kind organized anywhere in the world, including sixteen colloquia, special undergraduate courses, fifty public lectures, a Paris-Los Angeles public video conference, on exhibition on French political caricature, the first exhibition organized by the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris with any foreign university, a film retrospective and an exhibition on encyclopedias and politics, both of which traveled throughout the United States. In 1990, he was awarded the medal of the French Legion of Honor for his work in French cultural studies.

Along the way, Professor Maniquis has been a shoe-shine boy, a gang member, a boy scout, a dishwasher, a golf caddie, a bowling alley pinboy, a grave digger, a coffin polisher, a hamburger slinger, an automobile worker, a plumber’s assistant, a human subject in band-aid experiments, a lab assistant charged with brushing hamster’s teeth, an organist in a Baptist church, a truck driver, a foreman on an Oregon blackberry farm, an assistant to a private detective, a dialogue coach for several films, a script doctor, a private tutor to the fabulously rich, a translator, and the producer of orchestral music for a silent film.

He has also collected stamps. But his favorite work and pastime has been as a teacher of literature. He has most enjoyed teaching courses on the Bible as Literature, Marxist theory and Literature, Literature and Politics, Literature and Philosophy, The Discourses of Vice in Literature and seminars on William Blake, Sir Walter Scott, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Jane Austen.

Amongst his favorite things to do are late-night reading of anything and everything with neither discipline nor purpose, going to the movies, back-packing in the Sierras, scuba diving, deep-sea fishing, trout fishing, playing chess, playing poker, drinking good French wine, eating as many varieties of oysters that he can, intentional sleep deprivation in Los Angeles, and sleeping à la belle étoile on the banks of the Seine in Paris.

Interest Areas
• British Literature & Culture, 19th C. – Present
• Critical Theory