Leah Gordon

Leah Gordon, Harry S. Levitan Director of Education and Associate Professor of Education, holds a joint-Ph.D. in History and Education from the University of Pennsylvania. A historian of the twentieth century United States, Professor Gordon has particular interests in the history of education, intellectual history, the relationship between social science and social policy, and ideas about race, class, and inequality in modern America. Professor Gordon's first book, From Power to Prejudice: The Rise of Racial Individualism in Midcentury America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), received the 2016 Linda Eisenmann Prize from the History of Education Society. Professor Gordon is currently working on a second book, Imagining Opportunity: Education and Equality in Modern America (under contract with the University of Chicago Press), which provides a history of debates over the relationship between schooling and equality of opportunity in American culture and social thought since the 1930s. Professor Gordon's research has been awarded a number of fellowships, including from the Spencer Foundation, the National Academy of Education, the American Council of Learned Societies, and Stanford University's Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.