Steven Pinker is Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. His research on language and cognition has won prizes from the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution of Great Britain, the American Psychological Association, and the Cognitive Neuroscience Society.

He has also received several teaching awards and many prizes for his books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, and The Blank Slate. He has been named Humanist of the Year, and has been listed among Prospect’s “The World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals” and TIME’s “The 100 Most Influential People in the World Today.” He is currently Chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and writes frequently for The New York Times, Time, The New Republic, and other publications.

His 2011 book The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined bears the same title as his 2013 Gifford lecture. His most recent book is Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (Penguin, 2018).