Paul Lerner

Professor Lerner is a historian of nineteenth and twentieth-century Germany and Central Europe. He has written on the history of psychiatry, specifically on hysteria and trauma in the years around World War I in Germany, and he is now working on the reception and representation of department stores and modern forms of marketing and consumption in Germany and Central Europe. This project pays particular attention to the notion of the “Jewish department store” and the ways that various movements deployed images of Jews to critique excessive consumption or mass consumer society. Lerner is also part of a long-term project on gender in German Jewish history and is co-editing a volume of essays entitled: “Jewish Masculinities: German Jews, Gender and History.”