Zavier Nunn

Zavier is a final year History DPhil Candidate at St Catherine’s College, Oxford. His thesis, Trans Lives in Weimar and Nazi Germany, explores ruptures and continuities in Germanophone trans lives before and after the Nazi rise to power. Using a micro-historical approach to recover detailed accounts of individuals’ life stories based largely on medical, police and legal records, this research engages with major themes in the history of sexuality and gender while honouring the subjectivities of its historical actors and their untold stories. Zavier argues for a reconsideration of Weimar as a trans utopia followed by uniform Nazi persecution. Beginning with the bureaucratic inertia and medico-legal dependency of the Weimar years, followed by surprisingly heterogeneous treatment under Nazism, this thesis maps how trans people lived and loved before, during and after fascism. Zavier's work is forthcoming in Past & Present and Gender & History, and he is supervised by Profs. Nick Stargardt and Dan Healey.