Michael D. Gordin is the Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History in the Department of History at Princeton University and Dean of the College. He specializes in the history of the modern physical sciences, Russian, European, and American history. Gordin received his A.B. summa cum laude in History and Science from Harvard College in 1996 and his Ph.D. in the History of Science from Harvard University in 2001. Following a term as Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows, he joined Princeton as an assistant professor in 2003, becoming associate professor in 2007, professor in 2009, and Rosengarten Professor in 2013. His administrative roles include director of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts from 2017 to 2023, acting chair of the History Department from 2020 to 2021, and inaugural director of the Fung Global Fellows Program from 2013 to 2014. He is associated faculty in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and chief research fellow at the Poletayev Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow since 2019.

Gordin has been recognized with numerous honors, including the 2020 Derek Price/Rod Webster Prize from the History of Science Society, election to the Leopoldina in 2019, a Wilson Center Fellowship in 2019-2020, National Endowment for the Humanities and Guggenheim fellowships in 2011, and National Science Foundation support. Among his key publications are A Well-Ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table (Basic Books, 2004; revised Princeton University Press, 2019), Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War (Princeton University Press, 2007), Red Cloud at Dawn: Truman, Stalin, and the End of the Atomic Monopoly (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe (University of Chicago Press, 2012), Scientific Babel: How Science Was Done Before and After Global English (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Einstein in Bohemia (Princeton University Press, 2020), and On the Fringe: Where Science Meets Pseudoscience (Oxford University Press, 2021). He has chaired the editorial board of Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences (2014-2019) and served on the boards of Princeton University Press and several journals. Gordin's current research explores the history of global science after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Professional Email: mgordin@princeton.edu