Leah DeVun
I'm a historian, visual artist, and professor at Rutgers University. I study the history of gender and sexuality, the history of science and medicine, and the history of the body. I'm the author of the award-winning books The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance (Columbia University Press, 2021) and Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time (Columbia University Press, 2009), and I'm the co-editor of "Trans*historicities," a special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly (Duke University Press, 2018). I've also written about a range of topics for publications such as GLQ, Radical History Review, Journal of the History of Sexuality, postmedieval, Journal of the History of Ideas, Osiris, Wired.com, and Spot. My artwork is also deeply concerned with feminist and queer history, as well as archives, collectives, activism, reproduction, technology, and other related topics. My work or interviews have been featured in the New York Times, Artforum, Huffington Post, People Magazine, LARB, JSTOR Daily, Redbook, Feature Shoot, Slate, Capricious, Art Papers, LA Weekly, NYMag.com, Feministing.com, Gallerist, and other publications. I've given talks or exhibited artworks at many universities in the United States and Europe, and at art venues such as the ONE Archives Gallery and Museum, Blanton Museum of Art, Houston Center for Photography, Tang Teaching Museum, NYU's Fales Gallery & Special Collections, the Brooklyn Museum, and MoMA PS1 Contemporary Art Center.
www.leahdevun.com
Supervisors: Caroline Walker Bynum
Address: 111 Van Dyck Hall
16 Seminary Place
New Brunswick, NJ 08901
www.leahdevun.com
Supervisors: Caroline Walker Bynum
Address: 111 Van Dyck Hall
16 Seminary Place
New Brunswick, NJ 08901
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Books by Leah DeVun
Queer Lit is a podcast about LGBTQIA+* literature and culture. In each episode, literary studies researcher Lena Mattheis talks to an expert in the field of queer studies. Topics include lesbian literature, inclusive pronouns and language, gay history, trans and non-binary novels, intersectionality and favourite queer films, series or poems.
The Shape of Sex examines a host of thinkers—theologians, cartographers, natural philosophers, lawyers, poets, surgeons, and alchemists—who used ideas about nonbinary sex as conceptual tools to order their political, cultural, and natural worlds. DeVun reconstructs the cultural landscape navigated by individuals whose sex or gender did not fit the binary alongside debates about animality, sexuality, race, religion, and human nature. The Shape of Sex charts an embrace of nonbinary sex in early Christianity, its brutal erasure at the turn of the thirteenth century, and a new enthusiasm for nonbinary transformations at the dawn of the Renaissance. Along the way, DeVun explores beliefs that Adam and Jesus were nonbinary-sexed; images of “monstrous races” in encyclopedias, maps, and illuminated manuscripts; justifications for violence against purportedly nonbinary outsiders such as Jews and Muslims; and the surgical “correction” of bodies that seemed to flout binary divisions.
In a moment when questions about sex, gender, and identity have become incredibly urgent, The Shape of Sex casts new light on a complex and often contradictory past. It shows how premodern thinkers created a system of sex and embodiment that both anticipates and challenges modern beliefs about what it means to be male, female—and human.
Edited Volumes by Leah DeVun
Papers by Leah DeVun
Contributors: Kadji Amin, M. W. Bychowski, Julian B. Carter, Fernanda Carvajal, Howard Chiang, Leah DeVun, Ramzi Fawaz, Julian Gill-Peterson, Jack Halberstam, Asato Ikeda, Anson Koch-Rein, Jacob Lau, Kathleen P. Long, Robert Mills, Marcia Ochoa, David Primo, Kai Pyle, C. Riley Snorton, Susan Stryker, Zeb Tortorici, Jennifer Wilson.
manners that belie any simple opposition of modern and premodern paradigms. In addition, because surgical treatments of "hermaphrodites" in the Middle Ages prefigure in many ways the treatment of intersex in the modern world, I suggest that the writings of medieval surgeons have the potential to provide new perspectives on our current debates about surgery and sexual difference.
Curated by Leah DeVun And Zeb Tortorici.
Queer Lit is a podcast about LGBTQIA+* literature and culture. In each episode, literary studies researcher Lena Mattheis talks to an expert in the field of queer studies. Topics include lesbian literature, inclusive pronouns and language, gay history, trans and non-binary novels, intersectionality and favourite queer films, series or poems.
The Shape of Sex examines a host of thinkers—theologians, cartographers, natural philosophers, lawyers, poets, surgeons, and alchemists—who used ideas about nonbinary sex as conceptual tools to order their political, cultural, and natural worlds. DeVun reconstructs the cultural landscape navigated by individuals whose sex or gender did not fit the binary alongside debates about animality, sexuality, race, religion, and human nature. The Shape of Sex charts an embrace of nonbinary sex in early Christianity, its brutal erasure at the turn of the thirteenth century, and a new enthusiasm for nonbinary transformations at the dawn of the Renaissance. Along the way, DeVun explores beliefs that Adam and Jesus were nonbinary-sexed; images of “monstrous races” in encyclopedias, maps, and illuminated manuscripts; justifications for violence against purportedly nonbinary outsiders such as Jews and Muslims; and the surgical “correction” of bodies that seemed to flout binary divisions.
In a moment when questions about sex, gender, and identity have become incredibly urgent, The Shape of Sex casts new light on a complex and often contradictory past. It shows how premodern thinkers created a system of sex and embodiment that both anticipates and challenges modern beliefs about what it means to be male, female—and human.
Contributors: Kadji Amin, M. W. Bychowski, Julian B. Carter, Fernanda Carvajal, Howard Chiang, Leah DeVun, Ramzi Fawaz, Julian Gill-Peterson, Jack Halberstam, Asato Ikeda, Anson Koch-Rein, Jacob Lau, Kathleen P. Long, Robert Mills, Marcia Ochoa, David Primo, Kai Pyle, C. Riley Snorton, Susan Stryker, Zeb Tortorici, Jennifer Wilson.
manners that belie any simple opposition of modern and premodern paradigms. In addition, because surgical treatments of "hermaphrodites" in the Middle Ages prefigure in many ways the treatment of intersex in the modern world, I suggest that the writings of medieval surgeons have the potential to provide new perspectives on our current debates about surgery and sexual difference.
Curated by Leah DeVun And Zeb Tortorici.