Gordin, Michael D.

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GORDIN, Michael D.

PERSONAL: Male. Education: Harvard College, A.B. (summa cum laude), 1996; Harvard University, Ph.D., 2001.

ADDRESSES: Home—Princeton, NJ. Office—Princeton University, Department of History, G20 Dickinson Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Educator, author, and editor. Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, assistant professor of history; Harvard University Society of Fellows, Boston, MA, junior fellow, 2001-03 and 2004-05.

AWARDS, HONORS: Basic Prize in History of Science, 2004, for A Well-ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table.

WRITINGS:

(Editor and author of introductions, with Peter Galison and David Kaiser) The History of the Modern Physical Science in the Twentieth Century, Volume 1: Making Special Relativity, Volume 2: Making General Relativity, Volume 3: Quantum Histories, Volume 4: Physical Science and the Language of War, Routledge (New York, NY), 2001.

A Well-ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table, Basic Books (New York, NY), 2004.

SIDELIGHTS: Michael D. Gordin specializes in the history of Imperial Russia and the history of the modern physical sciences. His research centers on the connections between these two histories. Gordin has written articles on the fledgling field of science in Russia in the early eighteenth century, the relationship between literature and science in that country, and the history of biological warfare during the late Soviet period. His award-winning book A Well-ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table was published in 2004.

Mendeleev, the famous nineteenth-century Russian chemist, is best remembered for his role in developing the Periodic Table of Elements. He lived out most of his life during Russia's chaotic pre-Revolutionary years. Gordin juxtaposes Mendeleev's life and work with the social and political realities of Russia in the latter half of the 1800s. According to Bryce Christensen in Booklist, A Well-ordered Thing portrays Mendeleev as a scientific genius who "utterly failed to anticipate the revolutionary transformation" of his native land. A Publishers Weekly critic called Gordin's book a "fluid intellectual biography," and Wade M. Lee, writing in Library Journal, deemed it "the first important English-language biography of Mendeleev in a generation."