Dagmar Herzog is Distinguished Professor of History and the Daniel Rose Faculty Scholar at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.
Her work lies at the intersection of modern European history, Holocaust studies, the histories of sexuality and religion, disability history, and the politics of psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Through her historically wide-ranging work, Herzog develops incisive frameworks for understanding the entanglements of desire, violence, memory, and moral reckoning in modern political life.
She is the author of numerous books, including the award-winning The Question of Unworthy Life (2024), Unlearning Eugenics (2018), and Sex after Fascism (2005).
Her most recent book, The New Fascist Body (2025), analyzes the libidinal and aspirational fantasies of far-right politics, linking racism and anti-disability hostility to the pleasures of aggression and violence.
Her honors and fellowships include a Guggenheim Fellowship (2012) and the Günther Anders Prize for Critical Thinking (2026).
As a 2026–27 Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, she will pursue her project Fascism’s Lingering: Regime Change and Moral Reckoning.

In her talk in the PRISM Talk Series – Philosophical Reflections and Inquiries on Society and Mind, Dagmar Herzog draws on her book The New Fascist Body to explore the emotional workings of novel forms of fascism in Germany, highlighting recurrent themes of "sexy racism" and anti-disability politics within the contemporary far right as well as their antecedents in Nazism and before – resituating Nazism in a longer history of lethal malice to the vulnerable and the promise of national greatness. In the present, disinhibiting, deliberately contradictory messaging, and the "suture" of exciting libidinal transgression with ableist malice, construct not a backlash but a "frontlash," an anticipatory preemptive reaction against progressive inclusionary policies that have not even yet been widely implemented.