Peter E. Gordon

Biography

Peter Gordon is Amabel B. James Professor of History at Harvard University and resident faculty at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. He is also a faculty affiliate in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, and faculty affiliate in the Department of Philosophy. He works chiefly at the intersection of modern European intellectual history and continental philosophy. His books include Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (2003); The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy (2007); The Modernist Imagination: Essays in Critical Theory and Intellectual History (2008); Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (2010); Weimar Thought: A Contested Legacy (2013); and Adorno and Existence (2016). His next book, Migrants in the Profane: Critical Theory and the Question of Secularization, based on lectures he gave at Yale University in the Franz Rosenzweig Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought, is forthcoming from Yale University Press (Fall, 2020). Gordon is Co-chair of the Harvard Colloquium for Intellectual History. In 2005 he received the Phi Beta Kappa Award for Excellence in Teaching. He is currently working on a book on secularization and social thought in the twentieth century.

His book Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos was awarded the 2010 Jacques Barzun Prize from the American Philosophical Society.

Affiliations

• Amabel B. James Professor of History, Harvard University
• CES Resident Faculty & Seminar Co-chair, Harvard University
• Faculty Affiliate, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University
• Faculty Affiliate, Department of Philosophy, Harvard University

Publications

• "The Odd Couple," The Nation, June 8, 2016.
• "Critical Theory between the Sacred and the Profane," Constellations [Internet]. May 16, 2016.
• "An Opera of Permanent Catastrophe, and of Hope," The Nation, December 3, 2015.