Peter Thompson

Peter Thompson specializes in the history of modern science, technology, and the environment. His scholarly interests include the history of chemistry, technological approaches to environmental problems, and science under fascism. Increasingly, he is engaging with the emergent field of animal history.

His first book, The Gas Mask in Interwar Germany: Visions of Chemical Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2023), narrates the German production and use of the gas mask between the world wars. Focusing on the cultural imagination of a chemically-protected German nation, the book traces how chemical weapons and protective technologies like the gas mask produced new subjective relationships to danger, risk, management, and mastery in the modern age of mass destruction.

Related articles have appeared in Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, Central European History, German Studies Review, and History and Technology. Two of these articles won the North Carolina German Studies Seminar’s Konrad Jarausch Essay Prize for Advanced Graduate Students in Central European History, the German Studies Association Prize for the Best Essay in German Studies, and the NTM—Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Wissenschaften, Technik und Medizin Article Prize for Young Authors.

Before coming to MSU, Dr. Thompson earned a PhD in history at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where his research was supported by the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, the Siebel Scholars Program, and the Fulbright Program. Prior to joining the history department, he held a Haas Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Science History Institute (formerly the Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry) in Philadelphia and taught in MSU’s Lyman Briggs College.