Faculty and Staff
Matti Bunzl
Professor of History
Matti Bunzl specializes in the modern history and culture of Central Europe, with particular research interests in Jewish history, the history of gender and sexuality, nationalism, ethnicity, and memory. Additional interests include the history of anthropology, historical ethnography, and the intersection of history, literature, and culture. Bunzl recently completed the book Symptoms of Modernity: Jews and Queers in Late-Twentieth-Century Vienna (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). He is also the co-editor of Altering States: Ethnographies of Transition in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000 – with Daphne Berdahl and Martha Lampland) and Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in the Age of Empire (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003 – with Glenn Penny). Bunzl’s current research is in the history of anthropology with a special focus on Franz Boas and the connections between 19th-century German and 20th-century American anthropology.
Matti Bunzl received his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1998. He teaches courses on the history of anthropology and the history and culture of modern Jewry. He is also the director of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities.