Stefani Engelstein

Stefani Engelstein has a PhD from the University of Chicago (2001).She researches the ways Europeans have understood and classified themselves and others in knowledge-systems that span the humanities, sciences, and social sciences, particularly from 1750–1915, but with an eye on current repercussions. Such categories include race, sex, language family, religion, and species. Her current project, Sibling Action: The Genealogical Structure of Modernity (forthcoming, Columbia University Press), investigates genealogical sciences in the long nineteenth century which transformed contemporary terms in historical systems—whether languages, religions, races, nations, species, or subjects—into siblings of varying degrees.

Professor Engelstein’s first book, Anxious Anatomy: The Conception of the Human Form in Literary and Naturalist Discourse (SUNY, 2008) explored the contours of the body in surgical, naturalist, aesthetic, and literary texts to trace the transformation of the concept of teleology from an explanation for natural equilibrium to a rationalization for legitimating ideologies through the body.