School of Humanities and Sciences

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  • Eagan Dean

    Eagan Dean

    Postdoctoral Scholar, Comparative Literature

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsAt the Clayman Institue, Eagan Dean is completing his book manuscript, Inventing American Gender: Nineteenth Century American Literary Gender and its Uses. The monograph demonstrates that historical U.S. texts produced gender identities anew as rhetorical tools and used these tools to advance the political investments of their authors pertaining to racial and colonial power. Dean particularly focuses on emergent theories of the transgender figure’s role in the nation. The monograph investigates not simply what gender is, but what gender does in American history.

    At Stanford, Dean will also devote time to developing their second project, Possessing a “Twofold Soul”: Toward A Spiritual Genealogy of The Trans Self in America, which investigates how early American religious ideas about the ineffable inner soul influenced gender identity’s emergence as a concept. This project critiques the conceptions of gender as an abstract personal property which echo colonial theories of interiority, which in turn were designed to exclude racialized Americans. In 2024, Dean won the Rising Scholar Prize from The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists for an essay drawn from this project. He is currently developing an article on antebellum gender nonconformity as a scholarly identity in collaboration with The Harvard Library Bulletin.

  • Angelica Puzio

    Angelica Puzio

    Postdoctoral Scholar, Comparative Literature

  • Jana Pocrnja

    Jana Pocrnja

    Postdoctoral Scholar, Comparative Literature

    BioJana Pocrnja holds a Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of Vienna and is currently serving as a Max Kade Postdoctoral Scholar at the Department of Comparative Literature. Her ongoing research explores the intersection between philosophy and literature, with a particular focus on the concept of poetic reasoning in the works of María Zambrano. Previously, she has conducted research on 19th- and 20th-century Spanish/Latin American and French literature, as well as literary theory, particularly in the field of poetology and reader’s response theory.