
- Distinguished Professor, History
- Distinguished Professor, Social Welfare
- Distinguished Professor, Women's and Gender Studies
Research Interests
- Modern European
- History of Sexuality
- History of Religion
- Holocaust Studies
Education
- Ph.D. Brown University
Contact
Selected Publications

Unlearning Eugenics: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Disability in Post-Nazi Europe (Wisconsin 2018)
Review in H-Net
Interview with Nora Hilgert, German Historical Institute, Washington, DC, November 1st, 2019
Book Event at New York University, December 4th, 2018
Interview with Michael O'Sullivan, New Books in German Studies, January 25th, 2019
H-Diplo Roundtable, July 30th, 2019
Lecture, University of Tübingen, October 28, 2021

Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes (Cambridge UP 2017)
Review in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association
Review in the Journal of the History of Sexuality
Review in Contemporary Psychoanalysis
Interview with David Gutherz, New Books in Intellectual History, Sept. 7th, 2018
Presentation at the 50th anniversary of Psicoterapia e Scienze Umane, Bologna, December 17th, 2016
The Culture of Narcissism – Presentation at the 40th annual conference of the International Psychohistorical Association, New York, May 31st, 2017

Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History(Cambridge UP 2011)
Interview with Rorotoko, April 9th, 2012.

Sex in Crisis: The New Sexual Revolution and the Future of American Politics (Basic 2008).
Interview with Evan Derkacz, Religion Dispatches, June 11th 2009.
Interview with Leonard Lopate, WNYC, November 17th 2008.

Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton 2005); published in German translation as Die Politisierung der Lust: Sexualität in der deutschen Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Siedler/Random House 2005); in Japanese translation (Iwanami Shoten, 2011).

Intimacy and Exclusion: Religious Politics in Pre-Revolutionary Baden (Princeton 1996; Transaction 2007)
RECENT ESSAYS
- “From the Disability Murders Archive: Ernst Klee’s Confrontation of the Public with Nazism’s First Genocide,” in Linda Leskau et al., eds., Disability in German-Speaking Europe: History, Memory, Culture (2022)
- “On Being Adjacent to the Nazi Disability Murder Project,” in Irene Kacandes, ed., On Being Adjacent to Historical Violence (2022)
- “Vorwort zur Neuauflage,” Die Politisierung der Lust: Sexualität in der deutschen Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts (2021)
- “Follow the Money: Zur Lage der Behindertenrechte in den USA,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft46.3 (November 2020)
- “Moral Reasoning in the Wake of Mass Murder: Disability and Reproductive Rights in 1980s-1990s Germany,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 66 (2020)
- “Feminismus und Sexualpolitik: Die #MeToo-Bewegung und ihre Kritiker_innen,”Zeitschrift fürSexualforschung 33.3 (2020)
- “Queering Freud Differently: Radical Psychoanalysis and Ethnography in the 1970s-1980s,” Psychoanalysis & History 22.1 (2020)
- “Liebe und Gerechtigkeit: Magnus Hirschfeld in Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft,” inBundesstiftung Magnus Hirschfeld, ed., Liebe und Gerechtigkeit: Magnus Hirschfeld inVergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft (2020)
- “The ‘Euthanasia’ Murders Archive: Confronting the New Findings,” in Thomas Pegelow Kaplan et al., eds., Beyond “Ordinary Men”: Christopher R. Browning and Holocaust Historiography(2019)
Edited Collections

The Routledge Companion to Sexuality and Colonialism (with Chelsea Schields) (Routledge 2021)

Fritz Morgenthaler, On the Dialectics of Psychoanalytic Practice (Routledge 2020)

Anson Rabinbach, Staging the Third Reich: Essays in Cultural and Intellectual History (Routledge 2020)
Lust und Verwundbarkeit: Zur Zeitgeschichte der Sexualität in Europa und den USA (Wallstein 2018)
Review in Neue Zürcher Zeitung
Review in Sexuologie
Review in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
Review in Tagesspiegel
Review in h-soz-kult

After the History of Sexuality: German Genealogies With and Beyond Foucault (with Helmut Puff and Scott Spector) (Berghahn 2012)

Demokratie im Schatten der Gewalt: Geschichten des Privaten im deutschen Nachkrieg (with Daniel Fulda, Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, and Till van Rahden) (Wallstein 2010)

Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe's Twentieth Century (Palgrave 2009)

Sexuality in Austria (with Gunter Bischof and Anton Pelinka) (Transaction 2007)

Lessons and Legacies VII: The Holocaust in International Perspective (Northwestern 2006)

Sexuality and German Fascism (Berghahn 2004)
ADDITIONAL Interviews
- Die Geschichte von §218 in Ost und West, August 27, 2021
- “Internationale Perspektiven auf die sexuelle Bildung Erwachsener,” Praxishandbuch Sexuelle Bildung im Erwachsenenalter (Uwe Sielert), June 2021
- "Biografie in Büchern," Literarische Welt (Sarah Pines), 23 February 2019
- “Magnus Hirschfeld zum 150. Geburtstag” (Christoph Leibold), kulturWelt, Bayerischer Rundfunk, 14 May 2018
- “The Einstein of Sex at 150,” Gay City News (Benjamin Weinthal), 10 May 2018
- “Mit Sexualitat lasst sich immer und überall Politik machen,” Das Magazin (Daniel Binswanger), 19 March 2017
- מה אפשר ללמוד מההיסטוריה של המיניות [What can be learned from the history of sexuality], Ha’aretz (Moshe Sluhovsky and Michal Shapira, 4 January 2017
- Max Weber Programme, European University Institute (Fran Meissner),
Florence, 11 December 2014 - The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, 28 July 2010
- “Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals 1933-1945” (with James Steakley and Erik Jensen), University on the Air, Wisconsin Public Radio (Norman Gilliland and Emily Auerbach), 16 November 2008
- “Liebte der Osten anders?” (André Meier, arte-Dokumentation), 7 November 2006
Book Reviews
- “In Exile in the Promised Land.” Review of Andreas Krass, Moshe Sluhovsky, and Yuval Yonay, eds., Queer Jewish Lives between Central Europe and Mandatory Palestine, in the George L. Mosse Program Blog, University of Wisconsin-Madison (July 29, 2022).
- “Surviving Europe’s Horrendous 20th Century.” Review of Elisabeth Asbrink, 1947: Where Now Begins, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Mischka’s War, and Mark Mazower, What You Did Not Tell, in the New York Times Book Review (April 8, 2018): 26.
- “Hitler’s Little Helper: A History of Rampant Drug Use Under the Nazis.” Review of Norman Ohler, Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich, in the New York Times Book Review (April 2, 2017): 19.
- “Nazism: Bernard Wasserstein’s ‘Ambiguity of Virtue,’ and More.” New York Times Book Review (June 8, 2014): 38.
- “The Great Mediocrity.” Review of A. N. Wilson, Hitler, in the New York Times Book Review (June 24, 2012): 21.
- Günter Amendt, Gunter Schmidt, and Volkmar Sigusch, Sex Tells: Sexualforschung als Gesellschaftskritik, in Zeitschrift für Sexualforschung 24 (2011): 295-96.
- “Berlin Underground.” Review of Anne Nelson, Red Orchestra: The Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends who Resisted Hitler, in the New York Times Book Review (June 7, 2009): 13.
- “Handouts from Hitler.” Review of Götz Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, in the New York Times Book Review (February 18, 2007): 20.
- “Sexuality in the Postwar West.” Review essay, in Journal of Modern History 78 (March 2006): 144-71.
- Mark R. Lindsay, Covenanted Solidarity: The Theological Basis of Karl Barth’s Opposition to Nazi Antisemitism and the Holocaust, in Church History 74/3 (September 2005): 631-33.
Work in Progress
- In the Disability Murders Archive: Confronting Nazism’s First Genocide
Adorno Lectures, June 23-25, 2021: Behinderung, Macht, Moral - No Touching! The Corona-Crisis and Public Attitudes About Sex (funded by the Volkswagen-Stiftung)
Editorial Activities
Coeditor (with Matt ffytche): Psychoanalysis and History, see also "Where They Desire They Cannot Love"

Psychoanalysis Confronts Cognitive Disability
Board of Editors: Geschichte und Gesellschaft
Editorial Advisory Boards: German Politics and Society, German History, Zeitschrift für Sexualforschung, WSQ, L'Homme: European Journal of Feminist History
