Journal of the History of Ideas interview – The Concepts that Made Prehistory: An Interview with Stefanos Geroulanos

Stefanos Geroulanos is the Director of the Remarque Institute and Professor of History at New York University. At the center of Geroulanos’s work has been an interest in how the concept of the human has been made and remade in the past few centuries. Benjamin Diehl spoke with Geroulanos about his most recent book, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins (Liveright, 2024), which continues this work by examining how seemingly innocuous concepts drawn from prehistory have been used for political ends, often with devastating results.