Overview
Perry Zurn is Visiting Associate Professor of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University and Provost Associate Professor of Philosophy at American University. He researches primarily in political philosophy, critical theory, and transgender 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 ecology.
Zurn is the author of Curiosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry (2021) and How We Make Each Other: Trans Life at the Edge of the University (Duke, 2025), 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 has just finished writing a book on the term “cisgender” and is currently writing another on the philosophy of gender.