PHOTO: Sameer Khan
About
Profile
Michael Gordin is Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History in the History Department at Princeton University, where he specializes in the history of modern science, and from 2017 until 2023 served as Director of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts. In 2013-4 he served as the inaugural director of the Fung Global Fellows Program, and he is affiliated in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. 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. In 2011 he was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and was named a Guggenheim Fellow. In 2019, he was elected as a member of the Leopoldina, the National Academy of Sciences of Germany. He has published on the history of science, Russian history, and nuclear weapons. (See this brief profile.) During the 2023-2024 academic year he will be on sabbatical, based in Berlin, Germany.
Current Research
Professor Gordin is currently working on a history of what happened to global science after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, tracing the role of science in perestroika, glasnost, and Gorbachev’s Soviet Union, as well as following the paths of Soviet scientists in the successor states to the Soviet Union, the former Communist bloc, and the West (especially the United States, Germany, and Israel) in the ensuing decades.
CV
Click here to download a complete cv.
Contact information
post: History Department, 136 Dickinson Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544-1017
phone: 609-258-8095 / fax: 609-258-5326
email: mgordin@princeton.edu / departmental website