ISSG Welcomes Professor Zavier Nunn

By
Columbia ISSG
September 30, 2024

The Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender is thrilled to welcome Lecturer Zavier Nunn. Nunn joins us as a Fellow in the Society of Fellows, SOF/Heyman, Columbia University and will join ISSG as a lecturer.

As a historian of sex (change), the state, and subjectivity, Nunn specializes in the administration of medical and legal forms of transition in twentieth century Germany. He holds a PhD in History from the University of Oxford. Previously at Duke University’s Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies department, he was the Postdoctoral Associate of “Histories of the Transgender Present”.

His monograph, “Trans Liminality and Paranoid Past: Subjectivity and the State, Germany 1919-1945, is currently being revised by Duke University Press. The book overturns historical assumptions of gender and sexuality. Current projects include a tentatively titled book Sex from the Outside:”German Bureaucracy and the Changing of Sex, exploring the dictation what sex was and how it could change between German unifications. As well as a history of sexual different comparing the “wrong body narrative” with “sexual abnormality” within the contexts of why conceptually sex has stayed stagnant compared to the concepts of gender and sexuality.

Nunn is published in Past & Present, Gender & History, and German History.