Zavier Nunn
Assistant Professor of History and Gender and Sexuality Studies
- zavier.nunn@northwestern.edu
- Office Hours: Wednesdays 3:30 - 5:30pm
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 trans subjectivity and the governing of sex/change, specializing in the historical formation and administration of medical and legal transition in Weimar and Nazi Germany.
His first monograph, Trans Liminality: Life in Weimar and Nazi Germany is under review at Duke University Press. Challenging a paranoid paradigm that sees trans history as structured by phobia—resulting in either romantic or tragic outcomes—Trans Liminality tells the story of how transition came into historical being as an arrangement constituted by labour productivity, sexuality, and race, and how the policing of transition was adjudicated by the values and anxieties attached to social utility or threat over gender non-conformity. Liminality describes how transness manifested after its advent as a category of opacity that highlights thresholds of value pertinent to both liberal Weimar and illiberal Nazi Germany.
Nunn is (slowly) working on two new projects. Sex Changes (verb not plural) argues that sex is not only mutable at the level of the individual but at the level of history. Sex is an organization of meaning that is by definition a historical process that has changed over time, and is anything but an innate truth. Sex Changes traces sex’s reorganization across time and place and refutes anti-historical claims to biological immutability. Another project focuses squarely on the history of legal sex (re)classification. Tentatively titled Sex from the Outside: German Bureaucracy and Sex Classification, this book explores how mid-level functionaries dictated what sex was (and how it could change) between German unifications. Additional works in progress include essays on the desire for trans history and the ontology of man in feminist theory.
Nunn received his DPhil in History from the University of Oxford in 2023, and previously held postdoctoral positions at Duke University and Columbia University. At Northwestern, he offers classes on trans history, histories of sexual difference, and queer histories of the Holocaust.
Publications
Trans Liminality and the Nazi State
After Weimar; Beyond Hirschfeld? Nostalgia, Hagiography and What Comes Next