Gerald Izenberg

Gerald Izenberg, PhD

Gerald N. Izenberg is a professor of history at Washington University. Izenberg joined Washington University in 1976, and became a professor in 1991. He also helped create the Program in Literature and History and co-directed it from 1977 to 2004. He received a bachelor’s degree from University College, University of Toronto in 1961, and a master’s and doctoral degrees from Harvard University in 1962 and 1968, respectively. Additionally, he studied in Zurich and received a certificate in psychoanalysis from the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute. In 1995, Izenberg received a diploma from the St. Louis Psychoanalytic Institute. Since then, he has been active in the St. Louis institute, as a member and as a president, serving from 2003 – 2005. A three-time recipient of the Teaching Award in the Humanities at Washington University, given by students, Izenberg has also been recognized with a Distinguished Faculty Award in 1996.

Professor Izenberg is the author of The Existentialist Critique of Freud: The Crisis of Autonomy (Princeton University Press, 1976), Impossible Individuality: Romanticism, Revolution, and the Origins of Modern Selfhood, 1787-1802 (Princeton University Press, 1992) and Modernism and Masculinity: Mann, Wedekind, Kandinsky through World War I (University Of Chicago Press, 2000). In these books, and in essays such as “The Self in Question” in the academic journal Modern Intellectual History, Izenberg’s investigation into the “self” has contributed significantly to this growing body of literature and has placed him among the most accomplished historians of the concept of self in the country.

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