Cornell University Mosse Lecture
Stefanos Geroulanos, “The Normal and the Perverse (1968-1983)”
Tuesday, 15 April 2025, 16:45 EST
A.D. White House
27 East Ave.
Ithaca, NY 14853
Chaired by Enzo Traverso (Cornell University)
Sponsored by:
Mosse Lectures
Mosse Foundation
George L. Mosse Program in History
Cornell University Department of Romance Studies
Cornell University Department of History
Cornell University German Studies
Cornell University Jewish Studies
Cornell University LGBTQ+ Studies
Cornell University Feminist, Gender and Sexual Studies
Cornell University Institute for German Cultural Studies
Cornell University Society for the Humanities
Stefanos Geroulanos is the Director of the Remarque Institute and a Professor of European Intellectual History at New York University. He usually writes about concepts that weave together modern understandings of time, the human, and the body. His new book is a history of the concepts, images, and sciences of human origins since 1770, forthcoming from Liveright Press as The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins in 2024.
He is the author or co-author of 4 other books—on the history of antihumanism, on transparency in postwar French thought, and on neurophysiology and conceptions of the human body after World War I. He has co-edited or co-translated another dozen books.
He serves as a Co-Executive Editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas. In the past, he has also served as Director of the Center for International Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences (Centre National de Recherche Scientifique/NYU) and, with Gisèle Sapiro, as the co-Principal Investigator of the FACE Foundation’s PUF grant Crossroads in Intellectual History (2016-2021).
Enzo Traverso is Susan and Barton Winokur Professor in the Humanities at Cornell University. His research focuses on the intellectual history of the nineteenth and twentieth century. He was born in Italy, studied history at the University of Genoa and received his Ph.D. from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris in 1989. Before coming to Cornell in 2013, he taught political science for twenty years at the University of Piccardy, France. He has been a visiting professor in several European and Latin American universities. His authored several books, which are translated into more than fifteen languages, including The Jewish Question: History of a Marxist Debate (1994; 2018) The Jews and Germany: From the ‘Judeo-German Symbiosis’ to the Memory of Auschwitz (1995); The Origins of Nazi Violence (2003); The End of Jewish Modernity (2016); Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History and Memory (2016); Fire and Blood: The European Civil War 1914-1945 (2016); Revolution: An Intellectual History (2021); and Singular Pasts: The ‘I’ in Historiography (2022).