Modern Europe Colloquium: Scott Spector, Michigan University
Professor Spector’s newest book, which will be published in May with the University of Chicago Press, is titled Violent Sensations: Sex, Crime, and Utopia in Vienna and Berlin, 1860-1914. His research investigates the communities of marginality in fin-de-siècle Austria and Germany. He traces the ways that ideas of sexual and criminal deviancy were forged both through advancements in scientific expertise and news coverage of scandal. Violent Sensations demonstrates the
concurrence of a new understanding of urban depravity in Central Europe and a growing interest in social control. This project continues his work on the theme of peripherality in Central Europe, which his first book, Prague Territories, explored in spatial terms.
