Judith Surkis

Historian

Contact Information
Phone: (617) 495-4303 x207
E-Mail: surkis@fas.harvard.edu


Biographical Statement

Surkis is an associate professor of history, and of history and literature, at Harvard. Her research focuses on modern French cultural and intellectual history, as well as the history of gender, sexuality, and empire. Her book, Sexing the Citizen: Morality and Masculinity in France, 1870–1920 (2006), examines how masculine sexuality was central to the making of republican citizenship and social order. Her new book project, Scandalous Subjects: Policing Indecency in France and French Algeria, 1830–1930, explores how cultural debates about sexual scandals constituted and regulated the distinction between public and private in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century France. Surkis’s other publications include “Enemies Within: Venereal Disease and the Defense of French Masculinity Between the Wars,” in C. Forth and B. Taithe, eds., French Masculinities (2007). She co-chairs the Colloquia in Intellectual and Cultural History and the Seminar on French Politics, Culture, and Society at CES and the Seminar on Gender and Sexuality at the Humanities Center.