Peter Gordon is Amabel B. James Professor of History at Harvard University and resident faculty at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES), where he co-chairs the Harvard Colloquium for Intellectual History. He is also a faculty affiliate in the department of Germanic languages and literatures as well as the department of philosophy. Gordon works chiefly at the intersection of modern European intellectual history and continental philosophy. His most recent book, Migrants in the Profane: Critical Theory and the Question of Secularization (Yale University Press, 2020), is based on the Franz Rosenzweig Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought that Gordon presented at Yale University. His forthcoming book Prekäres Glück: Adorno über Negativität und Normativität will be published in German by Suhrkamp Verlag. The English edition, A Precarious Happiness: Adorno and the Sources of Normativity will be published in January 2024 by University of Chicago Press.
Gordon's previous 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 book Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos was awarded the 2010 Jacques Barzun Prize from the American Philosophical Society. In 2005 he received the Phi Beta Kappa Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Peter Gordon, A Precarious Happiness: Adorno and the Sources of Normativity, University of Chicago Press (forthcoming January 2024).
Peter Gordon, Migrants in the Profane: Critical Theory and the Question of Secularization, (Yale University Press, 2020). For reviews, see here.
On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Theodor W. Adorno's death in 1969, Peter Gordon delivered the Adorno Vorlesungen (Adorno Lectures) at the Institute for Social Research at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt in June 2019/ The theme of this three-part lecture series was "Adorno and the Sources of Normativity." The lectures were widely reviewed in the German press, including the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (see article here), and will be published by Suhrkamp Verlag under the title Prekäres Glück: Adorno über Negativität und Normativität.
Gordon, Peter, Hammer Espen, and Axel Honneth. Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School. Milton Park: Routledge , 2019.
Gordon, Peter, Espen Hammer, and Max Pensky. A Companion to Adorno. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2020.
Adorno, Theodor W., and Peter Gordon. Introduction. In Authoritarian Personality. London: Verso Books, 2019.
