About

Peter E. Gordon is the Amabel B. James Professor of History at Harvard University, with faculty affiliations in the Departments of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Government, and Philosophy. He is also a resident faculty member at Harvard's Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. Gordon is a critical theorist and historian specializing in modern European philosophy and social thought, with a focus on Frankfurt School critical theory, phenomenology, existentialism, and Western Marxism. He has contributed criticism and commentary to prominent periodicals including The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, The Boston Review of Books, The New Statesman, The Nation, The London Review of Books, and The New York Review of Books. His scholarship includes major works on Heidegger, the Frankfurt School, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. Gordon's first book, "Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy" (2003), received four international awards, including the Salo Baron Prize for Jewish history and the Goldstein-Goren Prize for Jewish philosophy. His second book, "Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos" (2010), won the Jacques Barzun Prize from the American Philosophical Society and was praised as a magisterial study for its philosophical analysis of the 1929 encounter between Heidegger and Cassirer. His third monograph, "Adorno and Existence" (2016), was published by Harvard University Press and reviewed in leading periodicals. His subsequent book, "Migrants in the Profane: Critical Theory and the Question of Secularization" (2020), based on Yale lectures, was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement and other outlets. He is also co-author of "Authoritarianism: Three Inquiries in Critical Theory" (2018). In 2019, Gordon delivered the Adorno Vorlesungen at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt on "Adorno and the Sources of Normativity," which was widely reviewed and published in German and English. He has edited numerous collections on modern Jewish philosophy, intellectual history, critical theory, and the Frankfurt School, including co-editing The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought (2019) and The Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School (2018). His most recent book, "Walter Benjamin: the Pearl Diver," was published in 2026 by Yale University Press. Gordon's work is recognized for its rigorous philosophical reconstruction and critical engagement with key figures and themes in modern European thought.

Research topics

• Medicine
• Psychology
• Natural Language Processing
• Machine Learning
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Science
• Developmental psychology
• Immunology
• Social psychology
• Bioinformatics
• Biology
• Cognitive psychology
• Audiology
• Neuroscience

Selected publications

• Narrative Ability in Autism and First-Degree Relatives

  UNC Libraries · 2025-12-18

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Sentence processing by humans and machines: Large language models as a tool to better understand human reading

  Psychonomic Bulletin & Review · 2025-08-13 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Effects of age and word frequency on Korean visual word recognition: Evidence from a web-based large-scale lexical-decision task.

  Psychology and Aging · 2024-01-18 · 3 citations

  article

  The present study examined age differences in word-frequency effects in Korean visual word recognition through a large-scale, web-based lexical-decision task. Four hundred ninety-seven adult Korean speakers in their 20s through 60s participated in the task, in which they decided the lexicality of 120 Korean words varying in frequency and 120 nonwords. Overall, both lexical-decision accuracy and response times increased with age, and more frequent words were recognized more rapidly than less frequent words. We also found significant effects of participants' reading skill as well as age of acquisition of words. Crucially, despite older adults' generally slower reaction times, there was no hint of any interaction between participant age and word frequency on lexical-decision times. This result adds to the literature on age-related changes in visual word recognition and provides evidence for stable word-frequency effect across the adult age spectrum. These findings are discussed with different hypotheses of lexical access and aging proposed in the literature. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• A trans-eyebrow zig-zag approach for frontal bone fractures✰

  Journal of Stomatology Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery · 2024-07-18

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Narrative Ability in Autism and First-Degree Relatives

  Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders · 2024-07-26 · 9 citations

  articleOpen access

  Narrative is an important communication skill for sharing personal experiences and connecting with others. Narrative skills are often impacted in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and have important consequences for social interactions and relationships. Subtle differences in narrative have also been reported among first-degree relatives of autistic individuals, suggesting that narrative may also be an etiologically important language-related skill that is influenced by genes associated with ASD. This study examined narrative ability and related visual attention during narration in ASD and first-degree relatives of individuals with ASD (siblings and parents) to understand how narrative and related attentional styles may be variably impacted across the spectrum of ASD genetic influence. Participants included 56 autistic individuals, 42 siblings of autistic individuals, 49 controls, 161 parents of autistic individuals, and 61 parent controls. Narratives were elicited using a wordless picture book presented on an eye tracker to record concurrent gaze. Findings revealed parallel patterns of narrative differences among ASD and sibling groups in the use of causal language to connect story elements and the use of cognitive and affective language. More subtle differences within the domain of causal language were evident in ASD parents. Parallel patterns in the ASD and sibling groups were also found for gaze during narration. Findings implicate causal language as a critical narrative skill that is impacted in ASD and may be reflective of ASD genetic influence in relatives. Gaze patterns during narration suggest similar attentional mechanisms associated with narrative among ASD families.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI
• RETRACTED

  Retraction Note: Mask-related costs in measuring preview benefit: Evidence from a distributional analysis based on target word reading times

  Attention Perception & Psychophysics · 2024-08-14

  articleSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI
• RETRACTED

  RETRACTED ARTICLE: Mask-related costs in measuring preview benefit: Evidence from a distributional analysis based on target word reading times

  Attention Perception & Psychophysics · 2023-08-02

  articleSenior authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Improvements in size, weight, and cost of laser modules for AR/VR/MR using stamped reflective optics

  2023-04-18

  article

  Augmented, virtual, and mixed reality (XR) displays require miniature light engines that can be worn near-theeye. Laser beam scanner (LBS) architectures use light from a hermetically-sealed laser beam module (LBM) and scan the light with a MEMS mirror into a combiner. This paper presents an improved method for packaging a red, green, and blue (RGB) LBM using stamped mirror arrays that fold the light beam, correct beam shape, and redirect beam propagation to a MEMS mirror. The mirror array simplifies the optical path and eliminates passive components like dichroic filters and refractive lenses such as those used for slow-axis and fast-axis correction. This new approach reduces the size, weight, and cost of LBMs for XR applications.

  PublisherDOI

• Stamped reflective optics in high-power optical assemblies

  2023-03-14 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Reading spaced and unspaced Korean text: Evidence from eye-tracking during reading

  Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology · 2022-05-20 · 24 citations

  articleSenior author

  In written Korean, spaces appear between phrasal units ("eojeols"). In Experiment 1, participants read sentences in which space information had been manipulated. Results indicated that removing spaces or replacing them with a symbol hindered reading, but this effect was not as disruptive as previously found in English. Experiment 2 presented sentences varying in the proportion of eojeols that ended with postpositional particles as well as the presence/absence of spaces. Results showed that space removal interfered with reading, but its effects were weaker when the sentence contained more postpositional particles. This suggests that postpositional particles provide an extra cue to word segmentation in Korean texts. These findings are discussed in relation to the unique characteristics of the Korean writing system and to the models of eye-movement control during reading in different languages.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Relational Memory and Language Comprehension

  NSF · $262k · 2008–2011

• Reading: Effects of Aging on the Interplay of Knowledge and Processing

  NIH · $400k · 2014–2017

• NIH Grant R01MH066271

  NIH · $911k · 2009

• Linguistic Memory Representations: Behavioral & Neural Assessment

  NIH · $782k · 2010–2015

Frequent coauthors

• Renske S. Hoedemaker

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  28 shared

• Matthew W. Lowder

  University of Richmond

  26 shared

• Randall Hendrick

  15 shared

• Tamara Y. Swaab

  University of California, Davis

  15 shared

• Wonil Choi

  14 shared

• Molly Losh

  Northwestern University

  11 shared

• C. Christine Camblin

  Duke University

  11 shared

• Kerry Ledoux

  Johns Hopkins Medicine

  9 shared

Education

• Ph.D., History

  Harvard University

  1993

• M.A., History

  University of California, Berkeley

  1988

• B.A., History

  University of California, Berkeley

  1985