Carolyn Dean

Carolyn J. Dean is Professor of History.  She is a cultural and intellectual historian of modern Europe with a particular focus on France, Germany, and Italy.  Her interests range from the history of gender and sexuality to genocide studies and the Holocaust of European Jewry.  She is the author of several books, most recently Aversion and Erasure: The Fate of the Victim after the Holocaust (Cornell, 2010) and The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust (Cornell, 2004).  She is also the author of many articles concerning the relationship between history and theory, where most of her work is situated.  She is currently working on a series of essays on recent narratives about human dignity and atrocity photography, and a larger book-scale project on the history of homophobia since the nineteenth century in Europe and the United States.

She taught at Brown University from 1991 to 2013, where she served as Associate Dean of the Faculty and interim director of the Cogut Humanities Center and the Watson Institute for International Studies.  She is the recipient of several fellowships, including a Guggenheim, an ACLS, and the 1996 Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Council for the Advancement of Support of Education Professor of the Year Award in Rhode Island.