Octobre 2024 à juin 2025
Craig Koslofsky teaches and supervises graduate research in early modern German, European, and Atlantic history at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. A first-generation college student, he earned his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan in 1994 after studies at Duke University (B.A., 1985), and at the University of Warwick, the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, and the Freie Universität Berlin.
His publications in Reformation history, the history of daily life, and the history of the body cover the period from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. He has recently published two co-edited books on early modern skin: Stigma: Marking Skin in the Early Modern World (with Katherine Dauge-Roth, 2023) and A German Barber-Surgeon in the Atlantic Slave Trade: The Seventeenth-Century Journal of Johann Peter Oettinger (with Roberto Zaugg, 2020) and worked with the Gerda Henkel Stiftung (Düsseldorf) to produce a short documentary on the history of skin, available in German and English at https://lisa.gerda-henkel-stiftung.de/ein_ort_an_dem_geschichte_gemacht_wird).
His global history of early modern skin, The Deep Surface: Skin in the Early Modern World, will appear with Cambridge University Press in 2025. In 2011 his award-winning book on the night, Evening's Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe, was published by Cambridge University Press.
The Deep Surface: Skin in the Early Modern World, 1450-1750
His research on skin in the early modern world locates the origins of modern conceptions of skin color and race at the intersection of early modern European, African, and American ways of marking and knowing skin.
He shows how West African and Native American scarification, tattooing, and dyeing challenged European ideas about skin marking as dishonorable. He then examines the dermal practices of Atlantic slavery, such as the branding of enslaved persons and the rise of the legal category “white” to understand early modern skin color as a new kind of dermal practice.
To do this work, he builds on the concept of "epidermalization" introduced by Frantz Fanon in his germinal Peau noire, masques blancs (1952). Fanon created the term epidermalization to describe the reduction of an individual to his or her skin color. His approach allows us to see human skin as a place where history is made, in this case revealing how the early modern European focus on skin color appropriated and inverted African and American dermal practices, marking skin as white, black, or tawny in the service of new social and economic ends, such as Atlantic slavery and settler colonialism. The Deep Surface follows the history of skin across geographic and disciplinary boundaries, revealing a fateful set of quotidian and embodied pathways to our modern, epidermalized world.
KOSLOFSKY, Craig. “Slavery and Skin: The Native Americans Ocktscha Rinscha and Tuski Stannaki in the Holy Roman Empire, 1722–1734,” in Beyond Exceptionalism: Traces of Slavery and the Slave Trade in Early Modern Germany, 1650–1850, edited by Rebekka von Mallinckrodt, Josef Köstlbauer, and Sarah Lentz, Berlin, De Gruyter, 2021, pp. 81-108.
KOSLOFSKY, Craig. “Offshoring the Invisible World? American Ghosts, Witches, and Demons in the Early Enlightenment,” Critical Research on Religion 21, 1 (2021): 126-41.
KOSLOFSKY, Craig. "Superficial Blackness? Johann Nicolas Pechlin's De Habitu et colore Aethiopum qui vulgo nigritae... (1677)," The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 18, 1 (2018): 140-58.
KOSLOFSKY, Craig. Evening's Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011, 430 p.
KOSLOFSKY, Craig. The Reformation of the Dead: Death and Ritual in Early Modern Germany, 1450-1700, Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan Press/St. Martin's Press, 2000, 223 p.
