Carolyn Dean
John Hay Professor of International Studies:
Senior Associate Dean of the Faculty
Phone: +1 401 863 2313
Phone 2: +1 401 863 2994
Carolyn_Dean@Brown.EDU
My project focuses on how different concepts of victimization developed in different European cultures after World War II and in particular on the creation of the "bad" versus "good" victims as a means of achieving cultural consensus about national identities. I would like to determine what new normative frameworks have evolved within which we can define who is a 'real' victim and who isn't—who deserves restitution and who does not. How have Western nations distinguished between 'deserving' and 'undeserving' victims when several groups now make claims to their own 'holocaust?' How can we learn about the construction of so-called deserving victims from the history of state and popular responses to various groups of victims?
Biography
Carolyn Dean's recent publications include: "Against Grandiloquence: 'Victim's Culture' and Jewish Memory," in Warren Brenkman, Peter Gordon, Samuel Moyn, and Dirk Moses, eds. Charting Modernity: New Essays in Intellectual History and Critical Theory (New York: Berghahn Books, forthcoming); "Recent French Discourses on Stalinism, Nazism, and 'Exorbitant' Jewish Memory," History & Memory, 18 (2006): 43-85; "Intellectual History and the Prominence of 'Things that Matter'," Rethinking History 4 (2004): 535-45; The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust (Cornell University Press, 2004). She is currently working on a project on the concept of victimization in Western Europe and the US (with specific emphasis on France and Italy after 1945).
Interests
Recently, a new narrative of "competition between victims" has emerged in both Europe and the United States. I continue to conduct research on how different concepts of victimization developed in different European cultures after World War II, and in particular on the creation of the "bad" versus "good" victims as a means of achieving cultural consensus about national identities in increasingly diverse and fragmented societies. The current narrative represents a contemporary version of this discourse. This project will involve a long-term comparative study and include the United States, France, and Italy. In different narratives, particularly in France, where there has been a resurgence of interest in comparing the crimes of Stalin and Hitler, critics have taken up the question of comparative victimization with some vehemence. Rather than participate in such debates, I would like to analyze them to determine what new normative frameworks have evolved within which we can define who is a 'real' victim and who isn't—who deserves restitution and who does not. How, then, have Western nations distinguished between 'deserving' and 'undeserving' victims when several groups now make claims to their own 'holocaust?' How can we learn about the construction of so-called deserving victims from the history of state and popular responses to various groups of victims, and why and when did the narrative, not only of competition between victims but also of contemporary society as a "victim's culture", emerge?
Awards
Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study and Conference Center Residency, July 2003.
William H. Annenberg Distinguished Professor, 1999-2002.
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, 1997-98.
Barrett Hazeltine Award for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching, 1997.
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education Professor of the Year in Rhode Island, 1996.
J. William Fulbright Research Scholarship (France), 1994-95.
The William G. McLoughlin Award for Teaching Excellence in the Social Sciences, Brown University, 1992-93.
American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, 1990-91.
Harvard University Mellon Faculty Fellowship in the Humanities, 1990-91.
Faculty Honor Role for Excellence in Teaching, Northwestern University, 1989-90.
University of California Regents Fellowship, 1985-86.
Affiliations
American Historical Association
Society for French Historical Studies
Teaching
Modern European Intellectual and Cultural History
Modern Gender History & the History of Sexuality
Genocide Studies
Web Links
- Carolyn Dean named R.I. Professor of Year
- Cultural historian Carolyn Dean to address new students Sept. 2
