Born in Seattle, Washington, Peter E. Gordon attended the University of Chicago and Reed College, and received his PhD in modern European intellectual history from the University of California at Berkeley in 1997. From 1998 to 2000, he was a member of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at Princeton University. He joined the faculty at Harvard University in the autumn of 2000, and he was appointed to a position on the permanent faculty in 2005. Gordon is the youngest son of Elaine Gordon, a Seattle-area occupational therapist and psychologist, now retired, and Milton P. Gordon, now deceased, a pioneer in plant genetics and tumor research who taught for many years on the faculty of biochemistry at the University of Washington in Seattle.