Carolyn J. Dean is Charles J. Stille Professor of History and French. She is a historian of modern Europe with a focus on the twentieth century whose work explores the intersection of ideas and culture, most recently in the context of genocide. Her latest book, The Moral Witness: Trials and Testimony after Genocide (Cornell, forthcoming 2019) traces the history of the witness to genocide, tracking the changing representation of violence over the last hundred years and demonstrating how the cultural meaning of genocide was distinguished from war and imperial conquest. She is the author of five other books that focus on the historical and cultural representation of victims, most recently Aversion and Erasure: The Fate of the Victim after the Holocaust (Cornell, 2010) and The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust (Cornell, 2004). She has also written extensively about gender and sexuality in France and on the intellectual history of French theory. She held the John Hay Professor of International Studies at Brown University, where she taught before coming to Yale in 2013 and her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, and others. She has also received Professor of the Year, awarded by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Council for the Advancement of Support of Education.
