Mordechai is an early modern European historian by training and a lecturer in the Political Science Department and Humanities Program at Yale. He was awarded the 2015 Elizabethan Prize for his dissertation on the spread of, and the religious and economic reactions to, early modern mathematical learning. In 2022 he was the inaugural winner of the Lux et Veritas faculty teaching award which “recognizes a Yale faculty member who actively fosters intellectual diversity for students in and out of the classroom.” His teaching ranges from ancient philosophy to the sociology of science and modern (and often, but not always, Jewish) intellectuals, and he has published both in academic journals and in popular magazines, ranging from Intellectual History Review to Tablet to the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Mordechai is writing a trade press history on the rise of the modern American university and the research ideal, and primarily works in the history and philosophy of learning and education (having had a fairly idiosyncratic education himself, ranging from homeschooling and various yeshivot to the University of Chicago). He has written and published on Jewish history, the history of science, technology, and mathematics, the history of economic thought, naval history, and intellectual history, and his work often bounces back and forth between the social sciences and the humanities.
He has been held fellowships from Tel Aviv University, the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, and the Smith Richardson Foundation, and, among other places. Before becoming a lecturer at Yale, he was a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the history department at Princeton University.