Carolyn J. Dean is John Hay Professor of International Studies at Brown University. She is the author of several books, including The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust, also from Cornell, The Frail Social Body, and Sexuality and Modern Western Culture.

The pervasive discourse on suffering and identity in French and American debates about Jewish victims in the Holocaust is the starting point for Carolyn J. Dean's thoughtful, provocative, and original study of the victim in post-Holocaust theory and historiography.(The American Historical Review) More important than Dean's judgment concerning the success or failure of any given historian she discusses is her belief that the present state of writing on victims of the Holocaust... has for the most part neglected important analytic questions concerning how our affective relations to victims are mobilized and institutionalized in the first place.... The underlying ethical impulse that drives the work of Dean and others not to accept normalization is one that commands respect and attention, even if we have yet to discover how to meet its representational requirements.(History and Theory) Dean's insightful study of the ongoing historical refashioning of Western cultural attitudes to victims is not about questions of Holocaust representation and memory, but about ideological hypocrisy, moral blind spots, and the limitations of historical and theoretical methods in confronting the affective dimension of institutionalized violence, and its impact on victims' experience and on how victims choose to testify to their suffering.(French Studies) This is a thoughtful scholarly work—clearly written, accessible and stimulating for a wide audience.(Reference & Research Book News)

Carolyn J. Dean is John Hay Professor of International Studies at Brown University. She is the author of several books, including The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust, also from Cornell, The Frail Social Body, and Sexuality and Modern Western Culture.

The pervasive discourse on suffering and identity in French and American debates about Jewish victims in the Holocaust is the starting point for Carolyn J. Dean's thoughtful, provocative, and original study of the victim in post-Holocaust theory and historiography.(The American Historical Review) More important than Dean's judgment concerning the success or failure of any given historian she discusses is her belief that the present state of writing on victims of the Holocaust... has for the most part neglected important analytic questions concerning how our affective relations to victims are mobilized and institutionalized in the first place.... The underlying ethical impulse that drives the work of Dean and others not to accept normalization is one that commands respect and attention, even if we have yet to discover how to meet its representational requirements.(History and Theory) Dean's insightful study of the ongoing historical refashioning of Western cultural attitudes to victims is not about questions of Holocaust representation and memory, but about ideological hypocrisy, moral blind spots, and the limitations of historical and theoretical methods in confronting the affective dimension of institutionalized violence, and its impact on victims' experience and on how victims choose to testify to their suffering.(French Studies) This is a thoughtful scholarly work—clearly written, accessible and stimulating for a wide audience.(Reference & Research Book News)

Carolyn J. Dean is John Hay Professor of International Studies at Brown University. She is the author of several books, including The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust, also from Cornell, The Frail Social Body, and Sexuality and Modern Western Culture.

The pervasive discourse on suffering and identity in French and American debates about Jewish victims in the Holocaust is the starting point for Carolyn J. Dean's thoughtful, provocative, and original study of the victim in post-Holocaust theory and historiography.(The American Historical Review) More important than Dean's judgment concerning the success or failure of any given historian she discusses is her belief that the present state of writing on victims of the Holocaust... has for the most part neglected important analytic questions concerning how our affective relations to victims are mobilized and institutionalized in the first place.... The underlying ethical impulse that drives the work of Dean and others not to accept normalization is one that commands respect and attention, even if we have yet to discover how to meet its representational requirements.(History and Theory) Dean's insightful study of the ongoing historical refashioning of Western cultural attitudes to victims is not about questions of Holocaust representation and memory, but about ideological hypocrisy, moral blind spots, and the limitations of historical and theoretical methods in confronting the affective dimension of institutionalized violence, and its impact on victims' experience and on how victims choose to testify to their suffering.(French Studies) This is a thoughtful scholarly work—clearly written, accessible and stimulating for a wide audience.(Reference & Research Book News)