The Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies
The Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies, Visiting Scholar
Perry Zurn is Provost Associate Professor of Philosophy at American University, and affiliate faculty in the Department of Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies, the Honors Program, and the Antiracist Research and Policy Center. Zurn is a Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies (‘23-’25) and a Fellow at Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities (‘23-’24). He researches primarily in political philosophy, critical theory, and transgender studies, and collaborates in psychology and network neuroscience. Zurn is the author of Curiosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry(2021) and the co-author of Curious Minds: The Power of Connection (2022). He is also the co-editor of Active Intolerance: Michel Foucault, the Prisons Information Group, and the Future of Abolition (2016), Curiosity Studies: A New Ecology of Knowledge (2020), and the co-editor and co-translator of Intolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group, 1970-1980(2021). Zurn is currently at work on a new monograph, How We Make Each Other: Trans Poetics at the Edge of the University (under contract, Duke University Press), and co-editing Trans Philosophy: Meaning and Mattering (forthcoming).
Zurn is the author or coauthor of 85+ additional publications in philosophy, political theory, trans studies, and network science and has given 180+ talks at local, national, and international venues. His theoretical essays have appeared in venues such as Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, Theory & Event, and Transgender Studies Quarterly. And his scientific collaborations have appeared in venues such as Nature Human Behavior and Nature Neuroscience. Zurn’s work has been featured in 50+ podcast, radio, and television shows, as well as in mainstream outlets. Zurn is the co-founder of the Trans Philosophy Project and the associated Thinking Trans // Trans Thinking Conference. Zurn’s previous appointments include SSNAP Fellow at Duke University, Research Associate at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center, and Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Curiosity in the School of Social Policy and Practice.