The Persistence of Wretched Subjects

Wolf Humanities Center • University of Pennsylvania

2025–2026 FORUM ON TRUTH

Conference Keynote |

Michael D. Gordin

Dean of the College and Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History, Princeton University

George Sarton, the founder of the modern discipline of the history of science, once characterized the study of ancient astrology as a waste of a time — a “wretched subject” — sparking decades of responses. Princeton historian of science Michael D. Gordin speaks about the persistence of the notion of wretched subjects, in three senses: first, the impressive and growing body of research on the borderlands between what counts (both in the past and in the present) as legitimate or illegitimate knowledge; second, the ubiquitous denigration by scholars and the public of both fringe subjects and the people who devote their time and energy to them; and, finally, the persistence of the fringe itself, which is an ineradicable part of the chaotic, nonlinear, and uncertain quest for expanding knowledge, in the sciences and outside of them.

More information: https://wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/events/gordin

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specializes in the history of the modern physical sciences and Russian, European, and American history. He is Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History, Professor of History, and Dean of the College at Princeton University. He earned his A.B. (1996) and his Ph.D. (2001) from Harvard University, and served a term at the Harvard Society of Fellows.

He has published articles on a variety of topics, such as the introduction of science into Russia in the early 18th century, the history of biological warfare in the late Soviet period, the relations between Russian literature and science, as well as a series of studies on the life and chemistry of Dmitrii I. Mendeleev, formulator of the periodic system of chemical elements. His first book is a cultural history of Mendeleev in the context of Imperial St. Petersburg, A Well-Ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table (Basic Books, 2004). He has also worked extensively in the early history of nuclear weapons, and is the author of Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War (Princeton, 2007), a history of the atomic bombings of Japan during World War II, and an international history of nuclear intelligence, Red Cloud at Dawn: Truman, Stalin, and the End of the Atomic Monopoly (FSG, 2009). In 2012, University of Chicago Press published his history of the controversies surrounding the boundary between science and pseudoscience focusing on the career of Immanuel Velikovsky, entitled The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe, and in 2013, the press also released How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality, which he co-authored with Lorraine Daston, Paul Erickson, Thomas Sturm, Rebecca Lemov, and Judy Klein. In 2015, University of Chicago Press and Profile Books published his Scientific Babel: How Science Was Done Before and After Global English, a history of modern science from the point of view of the languages in which science has been conducted. In 2020, he published Einstein in Bohemia (Princeton), which follows the intertwined paths of Albert Einstein and the city of Prague (where he taught during 1911–1912) across the twentieth century. In 2021, Oxford University Press published On the Fringe: Where Science Meets Pseudoscience, which uses the history and philosophy of "pseudoscience" to explore some features of how modern science works; this was published in paperback in 2023 as Pseudoscience: A Very Short Introduction. His most recent book, co-authored with Diana Kormos Buchwald, is Free Creations of the Human Mind: The Worlds of Albert Einstein (Oxford, 2025), which is a compact study of the life and work of the scientist.

In 2011, Dr. Gordin was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and was named a Guggenheim Fellow. In 2009, he was elected a member of the Leopoldina, the National Academy of Sciences of Germany.

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This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required.

The Wolf Humanities Center values inclusivity and we aim to create a welcoming environment for people of all backgrounds. Please feel free to note any accessibility needs or concerns in your registration, or connect with us by email or phone (215.573.8280).

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Widener Lecture Hall, Penn Museum, 3260 South Street, Philadelphia, United States