i am the director of the Remarque Institute and a professor of history at New York University. In my work, i research and write histories of the concepts that weave together our understanding of the human, of time, and of the body. i’m particularly interested in the ways that the concept of the human has been transformed in course of the last hundred years.
Sometimes i work more in conceptual history, sometimes more in history of science or in historical epistemology. i like to think that these fields cross over with others in fun and generative ways.
Books
My new book, The Invention of Prehistory, concerns modern conceptions of human origins and prehistory, and it is out with Liveright as of April 2024. It tracks the ways that prehistory is spoken about and used for political ends. It ranges from the late eighteenth century all the way to the present time, and it looks at the way particular expressions have played key roles in scientific theories and also in politics and everyday life. Often seemingly innocuous, these little expressions promise to explain the meaning of humanity, its future, and its place in the cosmos. They almost always carry heavy racial, gendered, and political burdens.
i've written or co-written four other books.
•• The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe (with Todd Meyers, 2018) is about how, around World War I, the human body was reconceptualized as both tightly integrated and very brittle. It is also about how this conception changed physiology, neurology, psychology, and other human sciences and more broadly, the understanding of the individual.
•• Transparency in Postwar France: A Critical History of the Present (2017) offers a criticism of the contemporary obsession with transparency by showing how in France philosophers, social scientists, filmmakers, and others believed transparency not to be a political ideal, but a potentially totalitarian illusion.
•• An Atheism that is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought (2010) is about the transformation of the concept of the human and the rise of antihumanism.
•• Finally, Experimente im Individuum (with Todd Meyers, 2014) is about the German-Jewish neurologist Goldstein, his work with brain-injured patients, and his influence on philosophy.
i have regularly collaborated in edited projects, including:
• with Natasha Wheatley and Dan Edelstein, Power and Time: Temporalities in Conflict and the Making of History (University of Chicago Press, 2020) . A German translation of our introduction was published in 2023 as Macht und Zeit by August / Matthes und Seitz Verlag.
• with Zvi Ben-Dor Benite and Nicole Jerr, The Scaffolding of Sovereignty (2017)
• with Francesco Pellizzi and Ben Kafka, a book of William Pietz’s famous essays The Problem of the Fetish, which includes the mysterious, previously unpublished chapter IIIb (Chicago, 2022)
• with Dagmar Herzog, Staging the Third Reich: Essays in Cultural and Intellectual History by Anson Rabinbach (Routledge, 2020)
• with Maria Stavrinaki, Writing Prehistory, a special issue of RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics (Spring-Fall 2018)
• with Leif Weatherby, Cybernetics and the Human Sciences, a special issue of History of the Human Sciences (Jan. 2020)
• with Gisèle Sapiro, The Routledge Handbook of the History and Sociology of Ideas (2023).
Finally, i’m the editor of volume 6 of Bloomsbury’s A Cultural History of Ideas (general editors Sophie Rosenfeld and Peter Struck): A Cultural History of Ideas in the Modern Age.
i co-translated two of Georges Canguilhem's books, Knowledge of Life and Writings on Medicine, and am now involved, as coeditor, in the project to prepare a new translation and critical edition of Michel Foucault’s Birth of the Clinic (for Routledge).
Since 2017, i have served as one of the Executive Editors of the Journal of the History of ideas.
Current Research
My principal research project for the coming years concerns the figure of the "New Man" in modern thought, science, and aesthetics—a study in the articulations and pursuits of a transformation and regeneration of "human nature." This project involves overviews of the aesthetic politics of regeneration from 1789 to the 1960s and of the sciences that imagined, tested, and sought to use human plasticity, roughly from the 1880s to the 1950s. It will also study key episodes in the two centuries after 1789, including the institution of the Napoleonic code and its sociopolitical implications; and the temporality of the Nazi "New Man." Part of this project is a separate book on the civil code (or Napoleonic code) in France.
Courses
In the fall of 2024 i will teach a mixed grad/undergrad class (Thursdays 2-7pm) on psychoanalysis and its history, with a focus on the multiplication of psychoanalytic theories in the post-1945 period. In the spring of 2024 i am teaching a seminar on the aesthetics and politics of Cyberpunk. Recent graduate courses include: "Concepts of the New Man, 1770-1970" and "Time and Power." Recent undergraduate courses include: "The Normal and the Abnormal: Sex, Power and the Psyche in Twentieth-Century European Intellectual History" and a course on sovereignty.
i grew up in Greece, received my BA from Princeton (2001) and PhD from Johns Hopkins (2008), and i came to NYU in 2008. In 2015-2017 i was Director of the Center for International Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences (Centre National de Recherche Scientifique/NYU, UMI 3199); in 2016-2022 i was the co-PI (with Gisèle Sapiro, EHESS) for Crossroads of Intellectual History (a Partner University Fund Project of the FACE Foundation). Together with Todd Meyers, i co-edited the series Forms of Living (2009-2019) for Fordham Univiersity Press.
Silly as it is, i prefer not to capitalize the first person singular, but usually autocorrect and professional expectations oblige me otherwise.
Related sites:
Journal of the History of Ideas (please send us your work!)
The image on the left is 'Epithalamion', a 1968 painting by Yannis Moralis that i've long wanted to use as a book cover (courtesy of Peggy Zoumboulakis Gallery and in agreement with the late Y.M.).
email sg127 [at] nyu.edu