Michael Gordin is Associate Professor of History, Acting Director, Program in Russian and Eurasian Studies, at Princeton University. He specializes in the history of the modern physical sciences and Imperial Russian and Soviet history, and his research concentrates on the intersection of these two areas. 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 (2004). He is also the author of Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War (2007), a history of the atomic bombings of Japan during World War II, and the editor, with Peter Galison and David Kaiser, of the four-volume Routledge Professor Gordin teaches courses in the history of modern science (History 292), and seminars on nuclear-weapons history and the history of pseudoscience History of the Modern Physical Sciences.