Stephen Kern

Stephen Kern taught at Northern Illinois University for 32 years, completing his tenure there as a Distinguished Research Professor. He came to Ohio State in 2002. He has been an Honorary Research Fellow at Harvard University and a visiting professor at the University of Michigan, Northwestern, and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was appointed a Humanities Distinguished Professor at Ohio State in 2004.

His area of specialization is modern European cultural and intellectual history, with particular interests in psychoanalysis, phenomenology, the body and sexuality, time and space, love, vision (the gaze), causality, and murder.
His major publications are Anatomy and Destiny: A Cultural History of the Human Body (1975), The Culture of Time and Space: 1880-1918 (1983, 2003), The Culture of Love: Victorians to Moderns (1992), Eyes of Love: The Gaze in English and French Paintings and Novels, (1996), A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder Novels, and Systems of Thought, (2004).

He has been awarded A.C.L.S., N.E.H., Rockefeller, and Guggenheim Fellowships and received the Ohio Academy of History Distinguished Historian Award for 2007. He is currently researching a book on modernism, modernity, and narrative.

Professor Kern maintains additional pages.