Stefanos Geroulanos
I'm in the process of moving this page to www.stefanos-geroulanos.com
I teach European intellectual history at New York University. My principal interests lie in conceptual history (particularly concepts, figures, and metaphors of time, prehistory, sovereignty, and the human), the history of medical thought, and historical epistemology.
I am currently researching and writing a project on the figure of the 'New Man' in European thought since the Enlightenment. This project has five component parts: the aesthetic politics of the New Man, roughly 1760-1980; Napoleon and the civil code; the sciences of human plasticity, 1850s-1960s; the modern obsession with origins and prehistory; and the more particular case of the Nazi New Man.
I've have published three books and a fourth is in production.
'An Atheism that is not Humanist Emerges in French Thought' (Stanford, 2010) concerned the concept of man and the emergence of antihumanism in interwar and postwar French thought, from Kojève and Koyré to Sartre, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty.
'Experimente im Individuum. Kurt Goldstein und die Frage des Organismus' (with Todd Meyers, 2014) is a study of the German-Jewish neuropsychiatrist Kurt Goldstein, his conception of the organism, his filmed experiments, and his influence on philosophers from Ernst Cassirer to Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
'Transparency in Postwar France: A Critical History of the Present' (Stanford, 2017) tracks the concept and figure of 'transparency', which postwar French thinkers (unlike their Anglo-American or other European counterparts) treated as profoundly troubling. The book looks at fields from philosophy to the anthropology of development and from psychiatry to the reconsideration of the 18th century in order to show how epistemological, ethical, and political discussions were framed by a rejection of "transparency" as a goal or premise of modernity. In its stead, they advocated counter-norms, theories of otherness, and forms of complexity in order to imagine a society and an epistemology that would not be easily recuperated by war, state violence, subjectivism, or social homogenization.
Finally, 'The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe' (with Todd Meyers, forthcoming in June 2018) traces how British, American, and German scientists (mostly physiologists, neurologists, endocrinologists, and clinicians) developed new conceptions of the body as hormonally-regulated or “homeostatic,” partly as a reaction to the violence that they saw inflicted on soldiers’ bodies in the theaters of World War I, and partly to the contemporary transformation of medical experimentation and care. It begins with the development of a new physiology in the early years of the twentieth century and asks how the ensuing reconceptualization of “the individual” as a highly complex, integrated and yet easily destroyed and self-destructive body, came to play an influential role in interwar politicoeconomic, psychological, and anthropological thought.
Edited projects in preparation include 'Power and Time' (with Dan Edelstein and Natasha Wheatley; under contract); 'Writing Prehistory' (with Maria Stavrinaki; forthcoming at the journal 'Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics'); and the twentieth-century volume of Bloomsbury's six-volume 'Cultural History of Ideas' (general editors Sophia Rosenfeld and Peter Struck). Recently I co-edited 'The Scaffolding of Sovereignty: Aesthetic and Global Perspectives in the History of a Concept' (Columbia, 2017).
Since May 2015, I have been one of the executive co-editors of the Journal of the History of Ideas. With Todd Meyers I co-edit "Forms of Living," a series at Fordham University Press centered on history of science / medical anthropology / philosophy of health and the body. That series includes two volumes by Georges Canguilhem that I co-translated ('Knowledge of Life', 2008, and 'Writings on Medicine', 2012).
At NYU, I have served as director of the Center for International Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences (a joint CNRS-NYU research unit, 2015-2017); associate director of the Remarque Institute (2015); and director of graduate studies in history.
I am currently teaching a graduate course on time, and (with Ara Merjian, Italian Studies and Art History) a freshman seminar on the 1960s. In the spring I will teach a core curriculum course on the modern obsessions with human prehistory, titled "The Birth of the Human."
Address: Department of History
53 Washington Square South
New York NY 10012
I teach European intellectual history at New York University. My principal interests lie in conceptual history (particularly concepts, figures, and metaphors of time, prehistory, sovereignty, and the human), the history of medical thought, and historical epistemology.
I am currently researching and writing a project on the figure of the 'New Man' in European thought since the Enlightenment. This project has five component parts: the aesthetic politics of the New Man, roughly 1760-1980; Napoleon and the civil code; the sciences of human plasticity, 1850s-1960s; the modern obsession with origins and prehistory; and the more particular case of the Nazi New Man.
I've have published three books and a fourth is in production.
'An Atheism that is not Humanist Emerges in French Thought' (Stanford, 2010) concerned the concept of man and the emergence of antihumanism in interwar and postwar French thought, from Kojève and Koyré to Sartre, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty.
'Experimente im Individuum. Kurt Goldstein und die Frage des Organismus' (with Todd Meyers, 2014) is a study of the German-Jewish neuropsychiatrist Kurt Goldstein, his conception of the organism, his filmed experiments, and his influence on philosophers from Ernst Cassirer to Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
'Transparency in Postwar France: A Critical History of the Present' (Stanford, 2017) tracks the concept and figure of 'transparency', which postwar French thinkers (unlike their Anglo-American or other European counterparts) treated as profoundly troubling. The book looks at fields from philosophy to the anthropology of development and from psychiatry to the reconsideration of the 18th century in order to show how epistemological, ethical, and political discussions were framed by a rejection of "transparency" as a goal or premise of modernity. In its stead, they advocated counter-norms, theories of otherness, and forms of complexity in order to imagine a society and an epistemology that would not be easily recuperated by war, state violence, subjectivism, or social homogenization.
Finally, 'The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe' (with Todd Meyers, forthcoming in June 2018) traces how British, American, and German scientists (mostly physiologists, neurologists, endocrinologists, and clinicians) developed new conceptions of the body as hormonally-regulated or “homeostatic,” partly as a reaction to the violence that they saw inflicted on soldiers’ bodies in the theaters of World War I, and partly to the contemporary transformation of medical experimentation and care. It begins with the development of a new physiology in the early years of the twentieth century and asks how the ensuing reconceptualization of “the individual” as a highly complex, integrated and yet easily destroyed and self-destructive body, came to play an influential role in interwar politicoeconomic, psychological, and anthropological thought.
Edited projects in preparation include 'Power and Time' (with Dan Edelstein and Natasha Wheatley; under contract); 'Writing Prehistory' (with Maria Stavrinaki; forthcoming at the journal 'Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics'); and the twentieth-century volume of Bloomsbury's six-volume 'Cultural History of Ideas' (general editors Sophia Rosenfeld and Peter Struck). Recently I co-edited 'The Scaffolding of Sovereignty: Aesthetic and Global Perspectives in the History of a Concept' (Columbia, 2017).
Since May 2015, I have been one of the executive co-editors of the Journal of the History of Ideas. With Todd Meyers I co-edit "Forms of Living," a series at Fordham University Press centered on history of science / medical anthropology / philosophy of health and the body. That series includes two volumes by Georges Canguilhem that I co-translated ('Knowledge of Life', 2008, and 'Writings on Medicine', 2012).
At NYU, I have served as director of the Center for International Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences (a joint CNRS-NYU research unit, 2015-2017); associate director of the Remarque Institute (2015); and director of graduate studies in history.
I am currently teaching a graduate course on time, and (with Ara Merjian, Italian Studies and Art History) a freshman seminar on the 1960s. In the spring I will teach a core curriculum course on the modern obsessions with human prehistory, titled "The Birth of the Human."
Address: Department of History
53 Washington Square South
New York NY 10012
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Books by Stefanos Geroulanos
Time is the backdrop of historical inquiry, yet it is much more than a featureless setting for events. Different temporalities interact dynamically; sometimes they coexist tensely, sometimes they clash violently. In this innovative volume, editors Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley challenge how we interpret history by focusing on the nexus of two concepts—“power” and “time”—as they manifest in a wide variety of case studies. Analyzing history, culture, politics, technology, law, art, and science, this engaging book shows how power is constituted through the shaping of temporal regimes in historically specific ways. Power and Time includes seventeen essays on human rights; sovereignty; Islamic, European, Chinese, and Indian history; slavery; capitalism; revolution; the Supreme Court; the Anthropocene; and even the Manson Family. Power and Time will be an agenda-setting volume, highlighting the work of some of the world’s most respected and original contemporary historians and posing fundamental questions for the craft of history.
"With elegance and rigor, Geroulanos traces the evolution of the concept of transparency in postwar France in fields ranging from philosophy and film to psychoanalysis, medicine, and social history. Interweaving original archival research with careful close readings, this extremely impressive semiotic history challenges us to think about texts, their contexts, and our present in fascinating new ways." (Camille Robcis Cornell University)
"Essential for understanding the problems we face in the digital age with regard to new forms of exposure, Geroulanos's masterful account of postwar thought inaugurates a new style of semiotic history and provides a necessary propaedeutic to a revaluation of our current ideals of transparency and openness." (Bernard Harcourt Columbia University)
"This expansive and original book sheds important new light on the thought of the 'trentes glorieuses' as profoundly preoccupied with opacity and otherness. Geroulanos communicates the deep ethical and political commitments that motivated these philosophical and social investigations, underscoring why the French thought that emerged in this period still matters." (Judith Surkis Rutgers University)
The essays in The Scaffolding of Sovereignty reveal that sovereignty has always been supported, complemented, and enforced by a complex aesthetic and intellectual scaffolding. This collection takes a multidisciplinary approach to investigating the concept on a global scale, ranging from an account of a Manchu emperor building a mosque to a discussion of the continuing power of Lenin's corpse, from an analysis of the death of kings in classical Greek tragedy to an exploration of the imagery of "the people" in the Age of Revolutions. Across seventeen chapters that closely study specific historical regimes and conflicts, the book's contributors examine intersections of authority, power, theatricality, science and medicine, jurisdiction, rulership, human rights, scholarship, religious and popular ideas, and international legal thought that support or undermine different instances of sovereign power and its representations.
Papers by Stefanos Geroulanos
Time is the backdrop of historical inquiry, yet it is much more than a featureless setting for events. Different temporalities interact dynamically; sometimes they coexist tensely, sometimes they clash violently. In this innovative volume, editors Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley challenge how we interpret history by focusing on the nexus of two concepts—“power” and “time”—as they manifest in a wide variety of case studies. Analyzing history, culture, politics, technology, law, art, and science, this engaging book shows how power is constituted through the shaping of temporal regimes in historically specific ways. Power and Time includes seventeen essays on human rights; sovereignty; Islamic, European, Chinese, and Indian history; slavery; capitalism; revolution; the Supreme Court; the Anthropocene; and even the Manson Family. Power and Time will be an agenda-setting volume, highlighting the work of some of the world’s most respected and original contemporary historians and posing fundamental questions for the craft of history.
"With elegance and rigor, Geroulanos traces the evolution of the concept of transparency in postwar France in fields ranging from philosophy and film to psychoanalysis, medicine, and social history. Interweaving original archival research with careful close readings, this extremely impressive semiotic history challenges us to think about texts, their contexts, and our present in fascinating new ways." (Camille Robcis Cornell University)
"Essential for understanding the problems we face in the digital age with regard to new forms of exposure, Geroulanos's masterful account of postwar thought inaugurates a new style of semiotic history and provides a necessary propaedeutic to a revaluation of our current ideals of transparency and openness." (Bernard Harcourt Columbia University)
"This expansive and original book sheds important new light on the thought of the 'trentes glorieuses' as profoundly preoccupied with opacity and otherness. Geroulanos communicates the deep ethical and political commitments that motivated these philosophical and social investigations, underscoring why the French thought that emerged in this period still matters." (Judith Surkis Rutgers University)
The essays in The Scaffolding of Sovereignty reveal that sovereignty has always been supported, complemented, and enforced by a complex aesthetic and intellectual scaffolding. This collection takes a multidisciplinary approach to investigating the concept on a global scale, ranging from an account of a Manchu emperor building a mosque to a discussion of the continuing power of Lenin's corpse, from an analysis of the death of kings in classical Greek tragedy to an exploration of the imagery of "the people" in the Age of Revolutions. Across seventeen chapters that closely study specific historical regimes and conflicts, the book's contributors examine intersections of authority, power, theatricality, science and medicine, jurisdiction, rulership, human rights, scholarship, religious and popular ideas, and international legal thought that support or undermine different instances of sovereign power and its representations.