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Visiting Fellow, 2018 – 2019

Daniel Gordon

Professor of History University of Massachusetts Amherst

Biography

Photo by Erielle Bakkum

Daniel Gordon is a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who specializes in the history of political ideas in Europe and the United States. He has published extensively on the French Enlightenment. Gordon’s book Citizens Without Sovereignty (Princeton University Press, 1994) addresses the history of liberalism and the debate about the origins of the French Revolution. Recent work has focused on issues in constitutional law such as the banning of the Muslim veil in France and other nations. Gordon has also published numerous intellectual profiles of major 20th-century social and political thinkers. Gordon co-edited the journal Historical Reflections from 2002 to 2016. His current book project uses databases of French texts to compare Alexis de Tocqueville’s vocabulary to previous authors, and to establish how Tocqueville brought about enduring changes in the language of history, sociology, and political science. During his Visiting Fellowship at the Neubauer Collegium he worked with the Textual Optics research team to explore linguistic innovation in the writings of Tocqueville.

Project