Eugene R Sheppard

EUGENE R. SHEPPARD is Associate Professor of Modern Jewish History and Thought in the Department of Near Eastern & Judaic Studies. He serves as Director of the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry, and an editor of the Tauber Institute Series with Brandeis University Press. He is the author of Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile: The Making of a Political Philosopher (Brandeis University Press 2007). He is an editor of the Tauber Series on Brandeis U. Press and is a founding co-editor of The Brandeis Library of Modern Jewish Thought which has produced more than a dozen volumes. He is currently writing a book that examines the life, writings, and reception of Valeriu Marcu (1899-1942), a German language popular historical writer, essayist, and Publizist of Romanian Jewish origin. What is particularly of interest to Sheppard about Marcu is the way in which his historical sketches, profiles, and more extended book length historical studies traced and expressed the origins of the present and unfolding horizon of the future. Sheppard sees Marcu's peculiar style of writing as expressing political and philosophical modes of Hegelian realism, a model of self-conscious skepticism regarding forms of naive or nefarious idealism.