Princeton University

Michael Gordin specializes in the history of the modern physical sciences and Russian history. He came to Princeton in 2003 after earning his A.B. (1996) and his Ph.D. (2001) from Harvard University, and serving a term at the Harvard Society of Fellows. He has published articles on a variety of topics, such as the introduction of science into Russia in the early 18th century, the history of biological warfare in the late Soviet period, the relations between Russian literature and science, as well as a series of studies on the life and chemistry of Dmitrii I. Mendeleev, formulator of the periodic system of chemical elements. His first book is a cultural history of Mendeleev in the context of Imperial St. Petersburg, A Well-Ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table (Basic Books, 2004). He has also worked extensively in the early history of nuclear weapons, and is the author of Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War (Princeton, 2007), a history of the atomic bombings of Japan during World War II, and of an international history of nuclear intelligence, Red Cloud at Dawn: Truman, Stalin, and the End of the Atomic Monopoly (FSG, 2009).  He has also co-edited the four-volume Routledge History of the Modern Physical Sciences (2001), with Peter Galison and David Kaiser, and Intelligentsia Science:  The Russian Century, 1860-1960 (2008), with Karl Hall and Alexei Kojevnikov.

Professor Gordin is currently working on two book projects.  The first is a history of "scientific languages": that subset of international languages which dominate international communication in the natural sciences. The book traces the history of these languages from the dominance of Latin in the Renaissance, to the nineteenth-century amalgam of French, German, and English, to the present-day omnipresence of English. The project emphasizes the particular role of language in the history of chemistry, and includes accounts of the rise of Russian as a scientific language and experiments with artificial languages (Esperanto and Ido) for the communication of science.  He is also working on a history of the modern category of "pseudoscience" in postwar America, from the age of McCarthy to the counterculture, centering on the sensational career of Immanuel Velikovsky (1895-1979), whose 1950 best-seller, Worlds in Collision, sparked three decades of controversy over the boundaries of legitimate science.

Professor Gordin teaches lecture courses in the history of modern science (History 292) and translation in the history of science (History 397), and seminars on nuclear-weapons history, the history of pseudoscience, the Soviet science system, and biography.