Jennifer Evans is an historian of 20th and 21st century Germany and Europe with expertise in queer and trans history, visual culture, memory, fascism, and new media. She has written two books on themes in the history of sexuality and another on social media and Holocaust memory. She has also published opinion pieces for The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, and the Berlin daily, the Tagesspiegel. When not writing books, she is the founder and co-curator of the New Fascism Syllabus project, which brings critical historical writing on the fascist/populist/authoritarian turn to a broad public. The NFS helped generate a major debate on Holocaust memory that has indelibly shaped the field and made the pages of Germany’s newspapers of record. In 2016, in the aftermath of Trump’s election as president, it platformed a letter of warning with signatures from scholars across the globe that was featured in The Guardian and on National Public Radio. Evans’s research, writing, and public intellectual work was recognized by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation with the Konrad Adenauer Research Prize, the German equivalent of the Guggenheim. She’s also a nationally ranked, competitive powerlifter in Canada and former gold medalist in bench press. Basically, she doesn’t sleep.
Evans has established herself as one of the leading voices of European queer history. She is a frequent speaker in the US, the UK, Australia, and Europe. In February 2023, she delivered the Stonewall Lecture at the University of Southampton, following in the footsteps of George Chauncey and Dagmar Herzog, and the Jonathan Cooper Lecture at Mansfield College, Oxford. She will give the Bleich Lecture at the Humanities Center at the University of Miami, Florida, which, given the current climate in the US is both daunting and urgent. Her latest book, The Queer Art of History: Queer Kinship After Fascism (Duke UP, 2023) was designed to do precisely this kind of work, to alert the reading public to all we’ve achieved and what remains to be done. As Ben Miller wrote in the Baffler, “there is a love for queer history running through Evans’s monograph; it is not a cold, calculating deconstruction of our love for our past but instead a proposal for how we can love it better.” Loving it and ourselves better through a better understanding of those that came before – this is, in essence, the heart of Evans’s work.
Agent: Doug Young