Peter S. Canellos is the author of “Revenge for the Sixties: Sam Alito and the Triumph of the Conservative Legal Movement.” The book explores the social and cultural history of the most successful legal movement in American history at the moment when it prepares to confront President Donald Trump’s unfettered ambitions.

Uncovering the personal history behind judicial decision-making has been a focus of Canellos’ writing career. His 2021 book, “The Great Dissenter: The Story of John Marshall Harlan, America’s Judicial Hero,” was chosen by Publisher’s Weekly as one of the top 20 nonfiction books of the year. It helped to draw renewed appreciation to one of the most consequential justices in Supreme Court history.

A native of Boston, Peter is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia Law School.

He launched his journalism career at The Boston Globe, where at various points he headed the paper’s local news coverage and Washington, D.C., bureau. As the Globe’s editorial page editor, he authored numerous editorials urging Bostonians to overcome their parochial divisions and embrace their status as a world-class city.

He also edited the Globe’s book, Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy, which was a top-10 New York Times bestseller in 2009. The book also set the stage for much of the analysis of Kennedy’s career following his death from cancer.

More recently, Peter served as executive editor of Politico, running the newsroom during the landmark 2016 presidential campaign. For much of the following ten years he oversaw the award-winning site’s magazine, enterprise and investigative coverage.

For the past 20 years, Peter has worked with the International Women’s Media Foundation supervising the Elizabeth Neuffer fellowship, given to a woman journalist from around the world to study human rights at MIT and intern at the Globe and New York Times. He has also traveled overseas on human rights trips with the US Holocaust Museum, International Reporting Project, and Robert Bosch foundation, among other groups.

As an editor, he has overseen two Pulitzer Prize-winning projects along with five others that were Pulitzer finalists, among many other award-winning projects and investigations. As a writer, he was a 2022 Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the George Polk Award and Robin Toner Prize, among other accolades, for writing about the Supreme Court. In 2011, he was recipient of the American Society of Newspaper Editors award for excellence in editorial writing.

Peter considers the many young journalists he’s hired and mentored over the years to be his greatest accomplishment.