The History Department at Michigan State University welcomes Dr. Peter Thompson as an assistant professor of history, specializing in science, technology, and the environment.
Dr. Thompson comes to the department from MSU’s Lyman Briggs College, where he taught for three years, and prior to that, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia. He earned a Ph.D. in history from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, an M.A. in European history from the University of Maine, and a B.A. in history and philosophy from Colby College. Dr. Thompson is most interested in the ways that developments in science and technology have impacted broader human culture, especially 20th century perceptions of the environment.
What drew you to your area of historical research?
I initially pursued graduate work based on an interest in the methods of cultural and intellectual history. I wanted to better understand the impact of concepts, cultural visions, and the thinkers who produced them over time. It was through the writings of interwar German intellectuals and artists that I gradually came to focus on militarized technologies like chemical weapons and the gas mask.
My first book, The Gas Mask in Interwar Germany, provides a cultural history of interwar German chemical weapons development, arguing that encounters with the gas mask produced new subjective perceptions of technological mastery and environmental danger.
What new questions are you currently exploring?
I am currently pursuing two distinct lines of research that both engage my long-standing academic focus on the history of violence as well as a developing interest in animal history.
First, I have begun to research the history of German hunting practices. I believe that the German influence on the development of modern hunting cultures has been underappreciated due to dominant English-language histories that neglect the diversity of hunters in parts of the British empire or the American West. A historical treatment of German hunting practices and corresponding cultural ideals can significantly add to our understanding of the dreams and norms that helped to animate 19th and 20th century imperialism. Such a history can also help to explain the movement of bodies (both human and animal) that have had significant impacts on environments around the world.
My second project is a study of mid-20th century animal weaponization projects in the United States. During and after World War II, the U.S. military created programs to turn bats, dogs, pigeons, and sharks (among other species) into militarized technologies. I argue that these projects, which included significant research into animal cognition, were important for the growing American appreciation of a rich interiority among certain animal species. As such, I am attempting to connect the growing acknowledgment of animal subjectivity to mid-century projects that forcibly enlisted animals for national war efforts.
What’s one historical misconception you often find yourself correcting?
I most often feel the need to challenge the belief that people in the past were simple, naïve, or morally suspect due to their nonattendance to contemporary cultural and social norms. Through historical narrative, I hope to imbue actors in the past with the same richness that we more generously grant to our contemporaries. Not only do I believe that this conforms to the reality of the human past, but I also think that if we are to learn anything from history, we must realize that our present, with all of its scientific and technological complexity, is not immune to the perennial challenges of the human condition.
What courses are you teaching this semester?
I am currently teaching HST 391: Environmental History of North America, which I have tailored around the concept of chemical history. The class narrates the extraction and synthesis of different chemical commodities over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries to see how the history of industrial chemistry has altered perceptions of the contemporary environment.
In the spring, I will teach HST 480: Seminar on Animal History. The course will cover some of the most important developments in our changing perceptions of animals over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. Through individual animal history research projects, students will be able to reflect on the extent to which the discipline of history can effectively narrate the lives of animals in the past.
Are you developing any new courses at MSU?
I am currently developing an IAH206 for Spring 2026 that is titled Technological Utopia: From Automata to AI. Telling the history of seminal technological utopians and the content of their visions, the class will introduce students to fundamental concepts in the history and philosophy of technology. It will further investigate the ways in which many visions of technological progress have been interpreted by others as dystopian nightmares, revealing the ways in which technologies are bound up (often imperfectly) in the social, cultural, and political structures of human societies. We’ll discuss everything from Barbie to Terminator, Afrofuturistic music to the invention of the theremin, imagined Soviet space colonies to the development of AI.
Next year I will offer HST 201: Historical Methods and Skills that introduces students to the fundamentals of studying history through an examination of Big Science, or large-scale scientific projects in the 20th century.
If you could travel to any historical moment (just to observe!), where would you go and why?
Provided that I am a disembodied observer, I would go back to watch people lead their daily lives during the Neolithic Revolution, starting around 10,000 BCE. Admittedly, anthropologists, rather than historians, tend to have more to tell us about such lives; but perhaps that is precisely why I am interested.
I would like to see the early domestication of plants and animals, the development of technologies like pottery and agricultural tools, and the creation of complex sedentary civilizations. Ultimately, I want to know if these major shifts in human lifestyle were as painful as some theorists would have us believe.
Which historical figure would you love to have dinner with? What would you ask them?
I am very attracted to the more colorful characters of history, especially self-styled scientific mavericks like John C. Lilly or Lytle S. Adams who turn modern history into a wild tale. However, I doubt that I would like to meet them, or most other historical figures who achieved any level of fame.
I would much rather meet an unknown person who could offer me an experience, preferably in the outdoors. Perhaps I could help with a harvest on a 19th century American farm or learn fishing tips from a medieval peasant. In general, I would like to physically experience the life ways and knowledge that we moderns are prone to forget.
What’s one thing you do for fun that might surprise your students and colleagues?
Given that I teach environmental history, it may not be a surprise that I spend much of my free time in the outdoors. I particularly like to fly fish in the rivers and streams of Michigan.