BIOGRAPHY

Trained as a historian of science, technology, and the environment, Dr. Peter Thompson recently published his first book, The Gas Mask in Interwar Germany: Visions of Chemical Modernity (Cambridge University Press, May 2023). Providing a cultural history of the gas mask from 1915 to the eve of the Second World War in Germany, the book traces how both chemical weapons and the protective technologies used to combat them produced new subjective relationships to danger, risk, management, and mastery in the modern age of mass destruction.

At Lyman Briggs, Dr. Thompson teaches courses in the history of technology, chemistry, and the environment that explicitly engage with questions of scientific and technological ethics. Broadly speaking, he is interested in the role of science and technology under German fascism, cultural understandings of both environmental dangers and the technologies devised to combat or control them, and theoretical approaches to the concept of the chemical. However, he is increasingly devoting his attention to histories of hunting and the development of invasive biology in the 20th century.

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LBC COURSES

• LB 133: Introduction to the History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Science
• LB 325A: Chemicals: A Residual History of the Modern Environment
• LB 321A: Big Science: A Comparative History of Large-Scale Scientific Projects
• LB 325A (in development): The Burden of Beasts: Approaches to Human-Animal Interaction

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EDUCATION

• Ph.D., History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• M.A., History, University of Maine
• B.A., History, Colby College

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AWARDS

• North Carolina German Studies Seminar’s Konrad Jarausch Essay Prize for Advanced Graduate Students in Central European History for “The Pale Death: Poison Gas and German Racial Exceptionalism, 1915-1945” (2020)
• German Studies Association Prize for the Best Essay in German Studies for “Wardens of the Toxic World: German Women’s Encounters with the Gas Mask, 1915-1945.” (2019)
• NTM—Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Wissenschaften, Technik und Medizin Article Prize for Young Authors for “Wardens of the Toxic World: German Women’s Encounters with the Gas Mask, 1915-1945.” (2019)
• John. G. and Evelyn Hartman Heiligenstein Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at University of Illinois (2017)

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PUBLICATIONS

Book:

• Thompson, Peter. The Gas Mask in Interwar Germany: Vision of Chemical Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023.

Articles:

• Thompson, Peter. “From Gas Hysteria to Atomic Fear: A Historical Synthesis of Chemical and Atomic Weapons.” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences. 52, no. 2 (2022): 223-264

• Thompson, Peter. “The Pale Death: Poison Gas and German Racial Exceptionalism, 1915-1945.” Central European History. 54, no. 2 (2021): 273-296.

• Thompson, Peter. “Wardens of the Toxic World: German Women’s Encounters with the Gas Mask, 1915-1945.” German Studies Review. 43, no. 2 (2020): 353-376.

• Thompson, Peter. “The Chemical Subject: Phenomenology and German Encounters with the Gas Mask in World War I.” History and Technology. 33, no. 3 (2017): 249-271.

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