Carolyn Dean designated the Stille Professor of History and French

Carolyn J. Dean, newly named as the Charles J. Stille Professor of History and French, focuses her research on the cultural and intellectual history of modern Europe; the history of gender and sexuality; and genocide studies and the Holocaust of European Jewry.

Dean is the author of five books, most recently “Aversion and Erasure: The Fate of the Victim after the Holocaust” and “The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust.” She has also written about the history of gender and sexuality, focusing on France in particular. Dean is currently working on a research project about the evolution of the concept of “bearing witness” to suffering since the Second World War and its impact on the creation of global humanity. Her other publications include numerous essays, chapters, and reviews in scholarly books and journals.

The Yale professor received her bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in history from the University of California-Berkeley. She held teaching positions there and at Northwestern University before joining the faculty at Brown University, where she taught from 1991 to 2013. Her academic and administrative positions at Brown included the John Hay Professor of International Studies, senior associate dean of the faculty, and interim director of the Cogut Humanities Center and the Watson Institute for International Studies. She came to Yale in 2013 as a professor of history and the following year was also appointed a professor of French.  

Dean is the recipient of several fellowships, including ones from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for the Advancement of Support of Education honored her in 1996 with the Professor of the Year award.