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Photograph of Perry Zurn

Perry Zurn Provost Associate Professor CAS | Philosophy and Religion

Bio
Perry Zurn is Provost Associate Professor of Philosophy at American University. Zurn researches primarily in political philosophy, critical theory, and lgbtq (esp. trans) studies and collaborates in psychology and network neuroscience. He is especially interested in the politics of inquiry and voice, material histories of resistance, poetics, and ecologies. Zurn has produced 8 books. He is the author of Curiosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry (2021), How We Make Each Other: Trans Life at the Edge of the University (2025), and Cisgender: Disorienting a Category (forthcoming), as well as the co-author of Curious Minds: The Power of Connection (2022). He is also the co-editor of Trans Philosophy (2024), Curiosity Studies: A New Ecology of Knowledge (2020), and Active Intolerance: Michel Foucault, the Prisons Information Group, and the Future of Abolition (2016), as well as the co-editor and co-translator of Intolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group, 1970-1980 (2021).

Zurn is the author or coauthor of 100+ additional publications in philosophy, political theory, trans studies, and network science and has given 250+ talks at local, national, and international venues. Zurn’s work has been featured in 50+ podcast, radio, and television shows, as well as in mainstream outlets. Zurn’s previous appointments include Visiting Associate Professor of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University, Fellow at Cornell University's Society for the Humanities, Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania’s FQT Center, SSNAP Fellow at Duke University, Research Associate at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center, and Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Curiosity in the School of Social Policy and Practice.
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Teaching

Fall 2025

  • PHIL-105 Intro to Western Phil/Culture

  • PHIL-236 Ecological Justice