Carolyn J. Dean, Ph.D

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. Her latest book, The Moral Witness: Trials and Testimony after Genocide (Cornell, 2019), traces the history of the witness to genocide, tracking the changing representation of mass violence over the last hundred years and showing 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. Her current project focuses on the history of bystanders during the Nazi Occupation of France.