Curriculum Vitae
PETER E. GORDON is the Amabel B. James Professor of History, Faculty Affilitate in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, and Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University. He is a critical theorist and an historian of modern European philosophy and social thought, specializing in Frankfurt School critical theory, phenomenology, existentialism, and Western Marxism. A frequent contributor of criticism and commentary to periodicals such as The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, The Boston Review of Books, The Nation, and The New York Review of Books, he has published major works on Heidegger, the Frankfurt School, Jürgen Habermas, and Theodor W. Adorno. His book Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (2003) received four international awards, including the Salo Baron Prize for the best book in Jewish history, the Goldstein-Goren Prize for the best book in Jewish philosophy, and the Forkosch Prize from the Journal of the History of Ideas. His second book, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (2010) received the Jacques Barzun Prize from the American Philosophical Society, one of the most distinguished awards in European and American cultural history. A comprehensive philosophical reconstruction and analysis of the 1929 encounter between Heidegger and Cassirer and Davos, it contested all allegorical or merely cultural interpretations of the debate to fasten our attention on its intrinsically philosophical content; it has been called a "magisterial" study in The New York Review of Books. His third and more recent monograph, Adorno and Existence, was published by Harvard University Press in 2016, and was reviewed in periodicals such as Critical Inquiry, and The New York Review of Books. His next book, Migrants in the Profane: Critical Theory and the Question of Secularization, based on lectures he gave at Yale University, was recently published by Yale (Fall, 2020); it was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, and other periodicals. He is also co-author of the book, Authoritarianism: Three Inquiries in Critical Theory, which also includes chapters by Wendy Brown and Max Pensky (2018). In June, 2019, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Theodor W. Adorno's death in 1969, he delivered the Adorno Vorlesungen at the Institute for Social Research at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, on the theme, "Adorno and the Sources of Normativity." The lectures, widely reviewed in the German press, including the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, are currently available online from the Institut für Sozialforschung, and will be published in German as Ein Prekäres Glück: Adorno und die Quellen der Normativität (by Suhrkamp Verlag in 2023) and also in English (with the University of Chicago Press) as A Precarious Happiness: Adorno and the Sources of Normativity.
Gordon has also edited numerous collections, including The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy (2007); The Modernist Imagination: Essays in Intellectual History and Critical Theory (2008); Weimar Thought: A Contested Legacy (2013); and The Trace of God: Derrida and Religion (2014). He is co-editor with Warren Breckman of The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought (2019), and he is co-editor with Espen Hammer and Axel Honneth of The Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School (2018), and co-editor with Espen Hammer and Max Pensky of A Companion to Adorno (Blackwell, 2019). He also helped to edit and wrote the introduction for the new edition of Adorno et al, The Authoritarian Personality (2019). He is currently writing a longer, more comprehensive study of secularization and social theory since Max Weber. A full listing of his publications can be found by consulting the "publications" link, by consulting his CV, or by following the link above to publications on amazon.
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