School of Humanities and Sciences
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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.
