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Zavier Nunn

Assistant Professor of History and Gender and Sexuality Studies

DPhil, University of Oxford, 2023

Interests

Geographic Field(s):  Modern European History: Central/Eastern Europe

Thematic Field(s):  Gender and Sexuality History; Legal and Criminal History; History of Science, Technology, and Medicine

Principal Research Interest(s):  Trans History; 20th Century; Nazi Germany; Sexual Difference and Sex Classification

Biography

Zavier Nunn is a historian of modern Europe whose work focuses on medical and legal efforts to regulate sex—who may engage in it, who may change it, and how—alongside the lived experiences of those subject to social and state policing.

His first monograph, Liminal Subjects: Trans Lives in Weimar and Nazi Germany, traces the historical emergence of medical and legal gender transition as a state-mediated process shaped by concerns about labor, sexuality, and race. Through the lives of six trans women, the book argues that transition was governed less by gender nonconformity itself than by broader assessments of social utility and perceived threat. It introduces liminality as a framework for understanding how transness functioned as a category of opacity, revealing shifting thresholds of value across both liberal and authoritarian regimes.

Nunn is currently working on a second project, Sex Changes, which examines how the category of “sex” has changed across time. Adopting a global and comparative perspective from the Enlightenment to the present, the project explores colonial systems of sexual classification, debates over hermaphroditism, hormone experimentation in Nazi concentration camps, and the emergence of gender in twentieth-century behavioral science. Together, these histories demonstrate how the apparent stability of sex as a category has depended on continual transformation.

Nunn received his DPhil in History from the University of Oxford in 2023 and has held postdoctoral positions at Duke University and Columbia University. At Northwestern University, he teaches courses on the history of sexual difference, sex in Nazi Germany, and trans history.

Publications