Zavier Nunn is the postdoctoral associate for the 2023-2024 annual theme 'Histories of the Transgender Present' in the Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies Department at Duke University. His PhD dissertation provides an everyday history of trans feminine life in Weimar and Nazi Germany, which de-idealizes the European medico-legal codification of trans identity. Here he also argues that trans women's liminal position within Nazi society reveal state persecution practices concerned with race, labour value, and (sexual) social threat. His second project will historicise modern trans subjectivity, specifically the ontology of an internal gender identity and its epistemological counterpart, the 'wrong body narrative'. Across his research, he uses micro-historical methods to unpick how macro systems and institutions are stitched together, and how affects circulate on a personal and collective level. His work is published in Past & Present and forthcoming in Gender & History and German History.
Zavier Nunn will be co-leading a Fall 2023 interdisciplinary in-person seminar course with Gabriel Rosenberg titled, GSF 960S: Histories of the Transgender Present.
Check out his latest article published in Gender & History, 1–17, titled “Against Anticipation, or, Camp Reading as Reparative to the Trans Feminine Past: A Microhistory in Nazi-Era Vienna.”. http://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0424.12721