Zavier Nunn is a historian of sex (change), the state, and subjectivity, specializing in the administration of medical and legal forms of transition in twentieth century Germany. He holds a PhD in History from the University of Oxford and was previously the Postdoctoral Associate of “Histories of the Transgender Present” in the Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies department at Duke University.

His first monograph, "Trans Liminality and the Paranoid Past: Subjectivity and the State, Germany 1919-45," is under review at Duke University Press. Tempering rosy accounts of queer life during Germany’s first democracy and challenging notions of uniform Nazi persecution against gender non-conformity with granular archival research, this book tells stories that overturn long-held assumptions in histories of gender and sexuality and complicate presentist expectations of this past.

Nunn is currently working on two new projects. The first is a history of legal sex change that tracks its continuation across liberal and illiberal political regimes, which understands “sex” and its alterability as symbolic of value systems that are carried under its sign. Tentatively titled Sex from the Outside: German Bureaucracy and the Changing of Sex, this book explores how mid-level functionaries dictated what sex was (and how it could change) between German unifications. Nunn is also working on a long dureé history of sexual difference that compares iterations of the “wrong body narrative” with “sexual abnormality” in contexts of anxiety over reproduction to query how (and why) sex—as a concept—has historically remained more stubbornly and ontologically stable than its siblings, gender and sexuality.

Across his research, Nunn uses historical methods that cut to the core of how macro systems (of meaning and matter) are stitched together. He is published in Past & Present, Gender & History, and German History.