Eagan Dean

Eagan Dean (they/he) is a scholar of American cultural history at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University.

Their research uses archival and literary analysis to understand the origins of contemporary beliefs about gender and transgender life. His work argues that current conversations about transgender experience are inseparably intertwined with the ideologies of race, colonialism, and misogyny which shaped the early U.S. A co-editor of A Cultural History of Trans Lives in the Nineteenth Century (forthcoming from Bloomsbury), Dean is committed to developing the field of trans cultural history in the U.S.

At the Clayman Institute, Eagan Dean is completing his book manuscript, Inventing American Gender: Nineteenth Century American Literary Gender and its Uses. The monograph demonstrates that historical U.S. texts produced gender identities anew as rhetorical tools and used these tools to advance the political investments of their authors pertaining to racial and colonial power. Dean particularly focuses on emergent theories of the transgender figure’s role in the nation. The monograph investigates not simply what gender is, but what gender does in American history. 

Dean’s publications in journals such as ESQ, Women’s Studies, and Legacy build on this line of research through book historical methods. As a book historian and archival researcher, Dean has been supported by a Ralph Waldo Emerson Fellowship at the Houghton Library at Harvard University and through a Heritage Book Shop Scholarship at the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School. He currently serves as co-editor of the Essays section in the Scholarly Editing journal.

At Stanford, Dean will also devote time to developing their second project, Possessing a “Twofold Soul”: Toward A Spiritual Genealogy of The Trans Self in America, which investigates how early American religious ideas about the ineffable inner soul influenced gender identity’s emergence as a concept. This project critiques the conceptions of gender as an abstract personal property which echo colonial theories of interiority, which in turn were designed to exclude racialized Americans. In 2024, Dean won the Rising Scholar Prize from The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists for an essay drawn from this project. He is currently developing an article on antebellum gender nonconformity as a scholarly identity in collaboration with The Harvard Library Bulletin. 

Prior to joining the Clayman Institute, Dean completed a PhD in Literatures in English with a certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University - New Brunswick. At Rutgers, he won several teaching awards and essay prizes, including the Excellence in Leadership and Teaching Award. This award recognized his development of new trans history curricula and his success in building classroom community as an independent instructor.