Leah Gordon

Harry S. Levitan Director of Education and Associate Professor of Education

Departments/Programs

Education
History

Degrees

University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D.
Brown University, B.A.

Expertise

History of Education; Twentieth Century US History; History of Social Science; Intellectual History; Race, Class, and Inequality

Profile

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.

Courses Taught

ED	120a	History of Higher Education in the U.S.
ED	150b	Purpose and Politics of Education

Awards and Honors

Linda Eisenmann Book Prize by History of Education Society (2016)

Charles Ryskamp Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies (2015 - 2016)

Faculty Fellowship, Stanford Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (2015 - 2016)

Spencer Foundation/National Academy of Education Postdoctoral Fellowship (2011 - 2012)

Fellow, National Forum on the Future of Liberal Education (2009 - 2015)

Young Scholars Award, Cheiron, the International Society for the History of Behavioral and Social Sciences (2009)

Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship (2006 - 2007)

Scholarship

Gordon, Leah. "Discrimination." Society on the Edge: Social Science and Public Policy in the Postwar United States. Ed. Philippe Fontaine and Jefferson D. Pooley. Cambridge, Eng: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 173-223.

Gordon, Leah. "Causality, Context, and Colorblindness: Equal Educational Opportunity and the Politics of Racist Disavowal." Seeing Race Again: Countering Colorblindness Across the Disciplines. Ed. Kimberlé Crenshaw, Daniel HoSang, Luke Harris, and George Lipsitz. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019. 224-245.

Gordon, Leah. "History for Justice: Michael Katz and the History of Education." Social Science History 41. 4 (2017): 760-765.

Gordon, Leah. "“If Opportunity is Not Enough: Coleman and His Critics in the Era of Equality of Results,”." History of Education Quarterly 57. 4 (2017): 601-615.

Gordon, Leah. From Power to Prejudice: The Rise of Racial Individualism in Midcentury America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Gordon, Leah. "The Individual and ‘The General Situation’: The Tension Barometer and the Race Problem at the University of Chicago, 1947-1954." Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 46. 1 (2010): 27-51.