Peter Galison

Peter Galison is the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor at Harvard University. His undergraduate degree is from Harvard (1977), his M. Phil. From Cambridge in 1978. From Harvard, he received his 1983 Ph.D. in theoretical high-energy physics and in the history of science. Recently, he (and Robb Moss) co-directed a feature documentary, Containment (2015), about the need to guard radioactive materials (and warn the future) for the 10,000-year future. The two also directed Secrecy (2008), on national security secrecy, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. In 1997, he was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship; he won a 1998 Pfizer Award for his 1997 Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics in the History of Science; in 1999 received the Max Planck and Humboldt Stiftung Prize. A Fellow of the American Physical Society, he is also a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society. His other books include How Experiments End (1987), Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps (2003), and Objectivity (with L. Daston, 2007). Galison’s work includes partnering with South African artist William Kentridge on a multi-screen installation, “The Refusal of Time” (2012). He is a co-founder of the Black Hole Initiative, an interdisciplinary center for the study of these most extreme objects. His current research is on the history and philosophy of black holes and, in a second project, on the changing relation of technology to the self. On digital matters: he co-directs Critical Media Practice (training a new generation of Ph.D. students to work with digital media) and the Film Study Center, both at Harvard.